A dazzling poetry collection, its intimations of doom lit by a furious clarity.
Climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Donald Trump are among the apocalyptic specters haunting these impassioned poems.
Caveat Lectorwebzine founder Bernard includes 91 poems that survey four years of anxiety and disaster in this volume. He starts with a Trump-themed cycle written as a hilariously on-the-nose infusion of Trumpian lingo into pastiches of poets, from T.S. Eliot (“November is the cruelest month, breeding / Electoral victories out of the dead land, mixing / Xenophobes and white Christians, stirring / Dull brains—and I mean dull! Sad!—with autumn rain”) to haiku master Bashō. (“You call this a what? / It doesn’t even. Look, believe me: / My poems. They rhyme.”) Bernard then drops his satirical tone to explore other dire happenings. “Spiritus” revisits the death of George Floyd. (“Underneath their knees, / in the brutal sun, / a dark form. And a voice from the feed: / ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t / breathe! I can’t breathe! I / can’t breathe!’ ”) Environmental destruction and the Covid-19 pandemic are linked in “April 2020.” (“Humankind was proving / a gorgeous catastrophe for life / on a planet the size of a pebble….We were the crown / virus enthroned in the breath of the world. / And now, in a cruelly fair reverse, / the crown virus has laid siege / to human monumentality.”) In “Faust Takes Command of the Titanic,” modern civilization is a deal with the devil, “arrogance / and desire gone round the bend with greed, / a drive toward absolute power / that can only lead to absolute annihilation.” Occasionally, hopeful notes surface, as in “Asteroid,” which likens humans to the cataclysm that wiped out the dinosaurs but wistfully concludes that, after people have destroyed themselves, “the birds—may fill the world, one day, again, with singing.” These are weighty poems on the weightiest of themes, but they are lifted by the author’s prophetic voice, lyrical sensibility, and evocative language, as in the seascape of “Beachdrift”: “Stump of a freighter out of the horizon haze / a big ugly thing / covered with cars and pickled plums and carbonated sake / in stacks on its deck like teeth or the columns at Paestum.” The result is a searing vision of a world teetering on the brink.
A dazzling poetry collection, its intimations of doom lit by a furious clarity.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58790-530-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Regent Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.
A high school senior pursues an affair with her teacher.
Seventeen-year-old Waldo, the narrator of McCurdy’s fiction debut, lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with her mother, though she’s long been the parent in their relationship. She heats her own frozen meals and pays the bills on time while her mom chases man after man and makes well-meaning promises she never keeps. Waldo blows her Victoria’s Secret wages on online shopping sprees and binges on junk food, inevitably crashing after the fleeting highs of her indulgences. Mr. Korgy, her creative writing teacher, has “thinning hair and nose pores”; he’s 40 years old and married with a child. Nevertheless—or possibly as a result?—Waldo’s attraction to him is “instant. So sudden it’s alarming. So palpable it’s confusing.” Mr. Korgy professes to want to keep their friendship aboveboard, but after a sexual encounter at the school’s winter formal that she initiates, an affair begins. Will this reckless pursuit be the one that actually satisfies Waldo, and is she as mature as she thinks she is? Waldo is a keen observer of people and provides sharp commentary on the punishing work of female beauty. Readers of McCurdy’s bestselling memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022), will surely be curious about the tumultuous mother-daughter relationship, and it is one of the novel’s highlights, full of realistic pity and anger and need. (“I want to scream at her. I want her to hug me.”) Unfortunately, the prose is often unwieldy and sometimes downright cringeworthy: When Waldo tells Mr. Korgy she loves him, “The words hang in the air in that constipated way they do when you know that you shouldn’t have said them.” Waldo frequently lists emotions and adjectives in triplicate, and events that could be significant aren’t sufficiently explored or given enough space to breathe before the novel races on to the next thing.
A debut novel with bright spots, but unbalanced and lacking in finesse.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593723739
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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