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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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