Arresting poetry that finds profundity in the seedier recesses of the human heart.
Lust, wrath, and a decided lack of pride in self and society fuel these scabrous poems.
Blackhelm voices men edging toward middle age, aware of their failures but hoping for fulfillment, which they often seek in lurid sexual encounters—real or imagined, glorious or deflating. “Space Jizz” salivates over a jaunty, space-suited, zero-gravity “exploration / Of heavenly bodies like this one / Course charted, the main one / For planet Heranus”; “Porn Star” registers a limp, disappointing tryst with an adult-film actress; and the lewdly devout “Christ on the Stripper Pole” limns an exotic pole-dancer: “Three songs and she’ll be gone / Like the three days on the cross…For she stands in the place of all womankind.” Other tawdry, banal, or infuriating corners of human experience are also explored with blunt intensity: “The Real D.C.” paints a nightmarish vision of a Washington D.C. divided between a callous political overclass and “heartless heartland tourists / In their white-bred, blood red MAGA caps,” and the rageful “Unreturned Wave” warns the ill-mannered that “When I wave to you / Or say hi in the hallway / You’d best acknowledge me / Or say hi back / Lest I kick your fucking ass.” Blackhelm’s verse is vigorous, grungy, confessional, and confrontational, and revels in making highbrows slum with low: “He do the police in different voices / Extremely poor man’s T.S. Eliot / But way more sexual / Than that glasses-wearing, Catholic-converted geek….Ezra pounded him up the butthole / But I’m way better than Ezra.” There is caustic, satirical humor in these poems but sincerity, too, as they plumb the feverishly emotional—even religious—resonance of our sleaziest impulses, as in “BR Tragedy (in Two Parts),” a cri de coeur against breast-reduction surgery: “Jesus weeps for the slain / Mounds of flesh / That you sacrificed for nothing / Blasphemer / May your new body burn in self-immolation / When it no longer inspires my lust.” Love it or hate it, Blackhelm’s poetic sensibility commands attention.
Arresting poetry that finds profundity in the seedier recesses of the human heart.Pub Date: March 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798306565125
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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