Brilliantly observant poetry that captures a dark moment in our recent history.
A New Yorker watches from his apartment window as a plague ravages the city in this prose poem by Pelzman.
Gabriel is a lonely, troubled, and divorced industrial designer who lives in an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Each day he observes his neighbors go about their lives in adjacent apartment blocks. Despite never having met them, he grows to know the actions of a select few intimately, including an aging Mancunian couple, a pair of gay doctors, a lonely old man, and a widowed socialite. The girl he nicknames Sophie particularly captivates Gabriel. He watches her go about her daily chores and grows jealous when any potential suitors visit. Gabriel observes sadly that “despite being separated by only a few inches of concrete, / they will never be of service to each other.” His neighbors suddenly begin to fall ill as a pandemic moves through the city. “Death is here,” declares the speaker, and the city’s forces are “depleted” for a moment. As Manhattan begins to recover, neighbors begin to “see” one another for the first time. What will this mean for Gabriel and Sophie? The author’s poetic narrative captures the rapid manner in which the city generates an ever changing spectacle for the distanced observer. The everyday street life is captured in short, urgently descriptive lines that comment on the action as it unfolds: “There is a cyclist, / a pot-bellied man, / who spits on the ground / and clears his nostrils.” Such descriptions are often interspersed with Gabriel’s reactions “(Gabriel believes that the social contract continues to erode”), framing each scene with personal opinion. The result is an intimate portrait of a metropolis that becomes distressingly distorted and paranoic with the onset of the “plague” (“An ambulance, / a deathmobile with pretty lights, / ambles up Amsterdam. / He glares at the ambulance / Stay away, / he warns”). Pelzman meticulously captures the shifting moods of the city during the pandemic and knits a captivatingly unconventional love story into the narrative. If future generations wish to understand what the Covid-19 lockdown felt like in America’s great cities, this book should be among the first on their reading list.
Brilliantly observant poetry that captures a dark moment in our recent history.Pub Date: June 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781733258562
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Jackson Heights Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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