short-book-reviews

Subtitled, Poems after Shia LaBeouf, this is a short volume of erasure poems lifted from interviews with Shia LaBeouf.  Before this book, I had only seen erasure poetry in poster or postcard format.  Kitch, at it's best.  Also, I have very little patience for poetry.  I've read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and never completely read any of the song-poems that are scattered throughout those volumes. All of this leaves me quite surprised that I really enjoyed this book....

Book cover Bonus review this week (because this book comes out on the 11th), and I finally figured out what to say about it. This tale is, all at once, heartbreaking, terrifying, uncomfortable, troubling with a tiny bit of hopeful mixed in.  Trigger warnings would be helpful here: racism, suicide, sexual predation, sexual bigotry, bullying, alcoholism, violence (both human and animal), parental abandonment, and smoking....

Book cover Even though I'm reviewing an Advance copy, this story is surprisingly nonlinear, and I doubt that will change, though - really - it could.  The book starts, like a 1970s movie, listing the cast of characters in the approximate order in which the characters appear.  It's a story about two people, writing screenplays that are not exactly about the same thing, but are derived from a shared starting point and past....

Before I start this: I met Jeremy Dale with Kelly by his side on several occasions at various comic book conventions.  I am always on the lookout for a well written all-ages comic book story, and I found Jeremy and Skyward when there were only two issues, self-published and in black and white.  Later, I saw him at a different convention and got issue 3, and he said that issue 4 should be out by NYCC....