The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems Yusef Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 128pp   Yusef Komunyakaa’s poems are governed by a deeply anthropological sensibility. This allows the slips of time and geography that occur in his latest majestic collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks, to reveal how human rituals and behavior repeat themselves across time and space. In “The Gold Pistol”, the language of folk tales, legends and myths evokes a sort of timeless evil: “There’s always someone who loves gold / bullion, boudoirs, & bathtubs, always / some dictator hiding in a concrete culvert / crying, Please don’t shoot, a high priest / who mastered false acts & blazonry”. In these opening lines, one’s thoughts might flit to Hitler or Saddam (“in a concrete culvert”). But Komunyakaa’s subject is another, more recent dictator: “& this is why my heart almost breaks / when a man dances with Gaddafi’s pistol / raised over his head, knowing the sun / runs to whatever shines”. What causes the poet’s heart to break is the historical inevitability (“the sun runs to whatever shines”). The military intervention in Libya, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, may have prompted brief celebrations in some quarters, but the aftermath has proved cruel. Indeed, […]

I See You Made An Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories From the Edge of 50 Annabelle Gurwitch Blue Rider Press/Penguin Random House, 2014; 256pp “Maintaining a sense of humor is the final frontier or at least our saving grace as we age.” Every seven and a half seconds, an American turns fifty. In her latest hilarious book, I See You Made An Effort, actress and writer Annabelle Gurwitch opens up about the many implications that passing over the threshold of fiftydom has had for her. Whether it’s the unfortunate synchrony of menopause and raising an adolescent boy, the temptations and pitfalls of having work done, or the increasingly depressing career options left open to her in the film and TV industry, she has a brilliantly funny story or flight of fancy to reassure you that with a little laughter we can all get through this together. As subject matter, ageing offers boundless opportunities for excruciating self-revelation. Gurwitch never misses a trick, whether discussing the leakage she experiences when trying out her son’s trampoline or her tentative steps onto the slippery slope of cosmetic surgery. “I’ve filled, frozen and ultrasounded,” she writes, “all in the name of what is often referred to as ‘maintenance.'” Trouble is, she adds, once […]

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe Lisa Randall Ecco, 2015; 432pp   In 1908, an object that may have been an asteroid or a comet exploded a few kilometers above the river Tunguska in the forests of Siberia. The blast was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima; the wave from the explosion went three times round the world, like Superman turning back time. It could be heard by people “living at a distance as far away as France is wide”. Windows shattered in a village seventy kilometers away. Two thousand square kilometers of forest were razed. It’s estimated that this exploding bolide (an object from space that disintegrates in the atmosphere) was maybe fifty meters wide. Rewind sixty-six million years. (You can probably see where this is going…) This impactor would have been an object the size of a major city moving 500 times faster than a vehicle on an autobahn… To put it in some perspective, an object of its size and speed would have released an energy equivalent to up to 100 trillion tons of TNT, more than a billion times greater than that of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima […]

Daydreams of Angels: Stories Heather O’Neill Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 368pp   A girl and a boy sit in a kitchen listening to their grandfather’s absurd stories of Christmas past, when potatoes had eyes and lions could speak. “It was harder to tell the difference between when you were asleep and when you were awake. Children would sit and slap each other in the face, trying to wake one another out of a dream when things weren’t going right.” In Heather O’Neill‘s strange and fabulous new collection, Daydreams of Angels, we too find ourselves in the liminal territory between dream and reality (whatever that may be). Hers is an imaginary world where tigers and wolves prowl the streets, where a soldier shot fifteen times can be revived by a toymaker and a child playing Bartók, where ascetic twins shipwrecked on a cello case can become international causes célèbres. Beautiful, witty and deeply Freudian (there’s even a Québécois wolf-boy), these stories are truly fairytales for adults. O’Neill lays out her cards right from the start. In “The Gypsy and the Bear“, the characters in a child’s fantasy are abandoned mid-story when the boy is called to lunch. In the midst of life, they find themselves, like Dante, […]

Heaven: Poems Rowan Ricardo Phillips Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015; 80pp Heaven, Rowan Ricardo Phillips‘s new collection, dazzles. Nominated last week for the National Book Award, it’s a playful inquiry by an imaginative poet-critic into the nature of capital-H Heaven. While its formal satisfactions derive from its subtle internal symmetries and architectonic qualities, Heaven is also continually surprising, as Phillips’s lexical invention and disruptive perceptions lend each poem a unique flavor. Flitting nimbly between Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, from Malibu to Colorado, and with a referential field encompassing Mel Gibson, the Wu-Tang Clan, and the stage directions of Cymbeline, it’s a rich reading experience. “Who the hell’s Heaven is this?” asks Phillips in “The Empyrean”; it’s a question that echoes through the rest of the book. There are gods in Heaven for sure — Zeus, Jupiter, Apollo, the deity of the Old Testament — but there’s also an underlying tension between the notion of Heaven as a place beyond and “heaven” as a function of ekphrastic poetry. In “The Barycenter”, natural beauty becomes a kind of heaven in itself: Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds. How this light, like a choir of silence, Queues in the air […]

Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home Joe Klein Simon & Schuster, 2015; 320pp The mind, body, and spirit of the American soldier are at the heart of Joe Klein’s moving new book, Charlie Mike. Told in a brisk, anecdotal style, it’s the story of the men and women who came home from Afghanistan and Iraq. They came home to a country ever-more disenchanted with their mission, to families who didn’t understand them, to friends who didn’t want to see them, and to a Veterans Administration insufficiently equipped to help them readjust. Since 2001, the American soldier has existed at a point where politics, ethics, and civics meet, and has had to bear too much the burden of representation. Some of those whose lives Klein captures conform to type, but others do not. We meet men and women who joined up for all kinds of reasons, political and otherwise. Their attitudes towards the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are multifarious and complex; their experiences of those wars left them in very different physical and emotional shape. What unites them is their civic spirit, the adrenaline-boosting, community-building, get-shit-done-lust that they all seem to leave the armed forces with. Their lives back home continue to be lived at full volume, at a higher frame […]

Doug Wright’s work is a broad church. He won an Obie in 1996 for the arch, racy Quills, which imagines the last days of the Marquis de Sade in the Charenton asylum. In 2004, he won a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize for I Am My Own Wife, a play about the German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a man who somehow survived both the Nazis and the East German Communists intact, which Wright dubbed “a one-woman show, performed by a man”. He penned the books for the Broadway musicals Grey Gardens, based on the cult film; Disney’s The Little Mermaid; and Hands on a Hardbody, a hugely entertaining show about an endurance contest to win a pickup truck. His most recent play, Posterity, performed earlier this year by the Atlantic Theater Company, had Henrik Ibsen as a central character. It’s hard to think of a playwright working today with a range as fabulous, as historically and socially broad, as Wright’s. He doesn’t always see it that way himself. When a friend remarked that his resumé made him a surprising choice for The Little Mermaid, Wright pointed out that the protagonists of both Mermaid and I Am My Own Wife seek to change “below the waist” to win the objects of their affection. […]

The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky PublicAffairs, 2015; 400pp One of the most remarkable features of Emma Sky’s gripping account of her experiences during the Iraq War is the fact that she was there at all. Time and again, visiting officials — Colin Powell, Tony Blair, David Miliband, Barack Obama — were bewildered to find a slight, British woman embedded in the highest ranks of the US military. Yet over the course of several extended tours of the country, that’s where she found herself. (You’d think one tour would be sufficient, but I imagine it’s hard to resist emails from four-star generals asking for your help.) When, in January 2011, she was called before the Chilcot Inquiry, Sky saw immediately that her story required a step back to take in: I had been opposed to the war and naturally suspicious of the military. Yet I had volunteered for three months to help get Iraq back on its feet — and within weeks of the fall of Saddam I had found myself governing a province. By the time I left Iraq many years later, I had served as the political adviser to American generals through the surge […]

A Carlin Home Companion: Growing Up With George by Kelly Carlin St. Martin’s Press, 2015; 336pp George Carlin plays the part of the magical storybook father for much of his daughter Kelly’s new memoir, A Carlin Home Companion, due to be published on September 15. He’s the fun dad, the dad who lets you do as you please. He mails cryptic postcards to Kelly with single words on, for her to string together as sentences; he makes peanut-butter sandwiches for her when she doesn’t fancy her mother’s cooking; and when he bakes with her, he makes one batch of “Kelly’s Spice Cake” and one of George’s (“another box of cake mix and a Baggie of weed”). The first third of this warm, witty, and ultimately wise book tells the story of George and Brenda, Kelly’s mother, up to the late 70s. Born in New York and inspired by comedians he saw at the movies, George early on hatched what Kelly refers to as the “Danny Kaye plan”: to become an entertainer. “There was never a plan B.” On the road, building his career as a stand-up, he met Brenda Hosbrook in Ohio in 1960. What, he asked her, does one do in Dayton after a show? […]