Review by New York Times Review
MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION, by Ottessa Moshfegh. (Penguin Press, $26.) In Moshfegh's darkly comic and profound novel, a troubled young woman evading grief decides to renew her spirit by spending the year sleeping. "I knew in my heart," she tells the reader, "that when I'd slept enough, I'd be O.K." DAYS OF AWE, by A. M. Homes. (Viking, $25.) The author's latest collection of stories confronts the beauty and violence of daily life with mordant wit and a focus on the flesh. Hanging over it all are questions, sliced through with Homes's dark humor, about how we metabolize strangeness, danger, horror. The characters seem to be looking around at their lives and asking: Is this even real? THE WIND IN MY HAIR: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran, by Masih Alinejad. (Little, Brown, $28.) In her passionate and often riveting memoir, Alinejad - an Iranian-American journalist and lifelong advocate for Muslim women - unspools her struggles against poverty, political repression and personal crises. IMPERIAL TWILIGHT: The Opium War and the End of China's Last Golden Age, by Stephen R. Platt. (Knopf, $35.) Platt's enthralling account of the Opium War describes a time when wealth and influence were shifting from East to West, and China was humiliated by Britain's overwhelming power. FROM COLD WAR TO HOT PEACE: An American Ambassador in Putin's Russia, by Michael McFaul. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) McFaul's memoir of his years representing the United States in Russia describes how his lifelong efforts to promote international understanding were undone by Vladimir Putin. HOUSE OF NUTTER: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, by Lance Richardson. (Crown Archetype, $28.) You may not know the name Tommy Nutter, but you should; he was a brilliant tailor who transformed stodgy Savile Row men's wear into flashy, widelapeled suits beloved by the likes of Elton John, the Beatles, Mick Jagger and Diana Ross back in the 1960s and 1970s. SPRING, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Ingvild Burkey. (Penguin Press, $27.) This novel, the third of a quartet of books addressed to Knausgaard's youngest child and featuring the author's signature minutely detailed description, recounts a medical emergency and its aftermath. HALF GODS, by Akil Kumarasamy. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Across decades and continents, the characters in this affecting debut story collection are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next. STILL LIFE WITH TWO DEAD PEACOCKS AND A GIRL: Poems, by Diane Seuss. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) Death, class, gender and art are among the entwined preoccupations in this marvelously complex and frightening volume. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Seuss, whose previous collection, Four-Legged Girl (2015), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, takes the title of her fourth collection from a Rembrandt painting, and visual art is everywhere in this long book containing a variety of forms. There are 12 Self-Portraits and 5 Still Lives. Although conventional ekphrasis is confined to the consideration of works of art, Seuss expands it, subjecting her own body, various possessions, and even the double helix to a kind of ekphrastic attention. The tone of these poems is reminiscent of Amy Gerstler, and she name checks Kenneth Patchen. A group of poems with a darker, occasionally ominous tone might be characterized as trailer-park gothic. These opening phrases from Stateline Pastoral are typical: Our hair is large. . . . Our bodies are wrong but coherent. The situation of the body, and situating the body in a degraded landscape that is nonetheless a home, might be the book's principal theme, assuming that a book so various could be said to have one.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Seuss (Four-Legged Girl) homes in on the act of engaging with art to brilliantly imagine worlds beyond a painting's frame. The real art work is in the action of regarding, Seuss suggests: "My eyes were hungry for paint, like I used to imagine/ a horse could taste the green in its mouth// before its lips found the grass." Flanked by invigorating ekphrastic poems and self-portraits, the collection's midsection, with scenes of discarded Americana rolling across a Walmart parking lot, has a different feel. But art abounds here too: "With the contents of one box and one can, we bake something/ so sweet and gold you'll want to marry the pan. In this way,/ we are alchemical." These middle poems focus on ordinary people without condescending or seeing them as tragic figures: "We are like bowls. There have always been bowls. They're shaped the way they are for a reason." Though the book has its moments of mourning, it avoids viewing the still life as a stagnant tableau in favor of considering it a fleeting glimpse of something much larger. These poems may linger in the darkness, but Seuss insists on "giving you/ hope like a weird dessert whether you want it or not." (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Titled after Rembrandt's famous painting, this collection from Pulitzer Prize finalist Seuss (Four-Legged Girl) reflects on art but does not offer your typical ekphrastic poems; they're ekphrastic poems on speed. (Ekphrasis, a technique as old as Homer and coming from the Greek meaning "to point out," references verse that details vivid scenes, particularly in art.) Seuss "point outs" and describes paintings by numerous artists, including Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Chardin, Breughel, O'Keefe, Rothko, and Pollock, in a style that changes from free verse to prose poems to sonnet variations. Reading these pieces is suggestive of being in an art museum and listening to Seuss observe various paintings, each of which she interprets in a freely associative manner. As her thoughts alight on the paintings, she discusses them with often stunning visual metaphors, as when she speaks of "the fluttering skirts of opium poppies." Seuss also fuses details from several paintings and effectively blends those details with episodes from her past, as when a still life with a turkey brings to mind incidents from her childhood and early adulthood. VERDICT Reading this collection is a dizzying, challenging, and an overall pleasant experience. Recommended for art lovers and academic libraries.-C. Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
