A chronicle of Norris’s inner and outer travels through Minnesota and the Dakotas, and how her settling there inspired a realization that one frequently winds up where one ought to be. Yet even in the “vertical and bottomless” urban badlands where the “clouds roll over Manhattan the way the earth settles on the dead,” there is suggested the bleak horizon-to-horizon panorama of the real Badlands, where “everything has been purified by loneliness.” But these are neither abstract nor sere poems. They are rich in apt, concrete detail and prickling with bodily sensations. Everything throbs with the music of living. Ordinary objects become imbued with their owners’ personae. It is people, stranded between past and future without ever experiencing a single moment in the present, Norris warns in her “Evaporation Poems,” who “must be careful not to disappear.” Espousing a Christianity shorn of its comforts and often stripped to its essentials, she pays homage to the wisdom of the body. She does so with humor that is more street-smart than sentimental, advising newcomers to earth (in “Excerpts from the Angel Handbook”) that there are those “not content unless their teeth are full of feathers.” One’s passage through life involves negotiating one’s way through the body. The simultaneously sensual and deeply spiritual qualities of Norris’s verse bring to mind the once outdated notion of the body as a temple of the spirit.
Journey is about growth and striving for enlightenment, not about having attained it—and these poems celebrate both the physicality of the body and the spiritual qualities inherent in a simplified life.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8229-4137-6
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Five friends meet on their first day of kindergarten at the exclusive Atwood School and remain lifelong friends through tragedy and triumph.
When Gabby, Billy, Izzie, Andy and Sean meet in the toy kitchen of the kindergarten classroom on their first day of school, no one can know how strong the group’s friendship will remain. Despite their different personalities and interests, the five grow up together and become even closer as they come into their own talents and life paths. But tragedy will strike and strike again. Family troubles, abusive parents, drugs, alcohol, stress, grief and even random bad luck will put pressure on each of them individually and as a group. Known for her emotional romances, Steel makes a bit of a departure with this effort that follows a group of friends through young adulthood. But even as one tragedy after another befalls the friends, the impact of the events is blunted by a distant narrative style that lacks emotional intensity.
More about grief and tragedy than romance.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-34321-3
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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