A powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion.
Lanier offers a collection of poems addressing motherhood and religion.
This body of poems straddles the delicate creation of new life and the unpredictability of death. The author begins with a poem about pumping breast milk at work (“Pumping Milk”). As she stands topless in the office, she contemplates the strange dichotomy of her identity: “half of me is made / for spring break gone primal, / the other half / will write a memo. / Is this what it means / to be a mother? The self, split.” She complains about a walk interrupted by someone pushing free Bibles and ponders a looming government shutdown while marveling that her body houses “someone thirty weeks in the making / and already a heart beating” (“Bed Rest”). Bizarre stories (a bear takes police on a wild chase) mingle with tragic ones (police violence against Black men). She imagines what Jesus doodled in the sand, adopts the point of view of Eve, and wonders about the Virgin Mary’s experience of pregnancy. As critical as the poet is of religion, she also acknowledges that “science / can’t state a single / thing sturdily” (“ ‘Jesus Might Have Walked on Ice,’ Scientists Say"). Lanier’s metaphors are masterful. Her pregnant body is “a bulbous / water-slow clock of waiting” (“The Making”). A baby has “Q-tip toes of a newborn” (“Only a Sliver of Love Runs Hot”). Of pumping breast milk at work, she writes, “I’ll soon hook up / with plastic trumpets, turn on / my motor, get milked.” Her descriptions are visceral and unique—in “Bed Rest,” a midwife “cranks / the metal beak” of a speculum during a prenatal exam. Lanier’s truth telling is bold and vulnerable. Following her father’s death, she writes, “Grief wails the first year, but by the seventh / it whispers. The quiet is maddening” (“Ode to Seven”). She captures the ambivalence and anxiety of motherhood accurately; nearing the end of her pregnancy, she writes, “I’ve tried, for your sake, to love / this state” (“Forecast in the Thirty-First Week”).When the poems veer into politics, however, they lose a little magic.
A powerful poetic reckoning with motherhood and religion.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781958972069
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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