Intense, intimate, self-lacerating poetry about unhealed social and psychic wounds.
Bigotry and emotional trauma scar African Americans and their relationships in these poems.
Amos’ blunt language probes racism’s legacy in the minds and hearts of Black men and their loved ones. In the title poem, he notes “the stereotypes linked to the sequences of our genes” that leave Black people “programmed to not love ourselves” while in “Black Deficiency,” he challenges White society to confront its culpability, asking “will you continue to be implicit / in your reinforcement of a supremacist system?” In “Masculinity so Fragile,” he explores how Black men’s insecurities spill over into the mistreatment of women: “Lying. / Cheating. / Using, and abusing, / and yet she still manages / to support us / despite our habits. / Why are belittling names used to identify her social / status?” Probing deeper, “To Be Heard” calls out the conflation of emotional expressivity with unmanliness—“Listen to me complain like a / ‘punk’, / ‘wimp’, / or other suggestive terms / that describe my ‘weakened state’ ”—and extols the possibility that “Love is genderless, / Pure, / Divine.” Several poems plumb the complexities of romance. In the luminous “Synthesis,” love is as foundational as physics—“You’ve become the gravity to my soul / …Our wavelengths intersect for the creation of a new spectrum”—while the plangent “Restrained” charts a drift into mutual incomprehension. “We were once on the same page, / The same sentence, / The same word; /…Then we parted paragraphs, / Sheets, / And now we’re no longer in the same genre.” The author’s depression poems, like the suicidal “Break Up,” get very bleak indeed—“I saw death approaching, / It turned the other way. / I initiated the pursuit, / and now we’re in a chase”—but he recovers a purpose, fatherhood, in “Nothing Else Matters.” “When I was 19... / I was shedding tears because you weren’t born yet, / too eager and desperate to meet up with you.” Amos’ searing verse is direct and plainspoken but studded with incisive metaphors. His critique of racism can be strident at times, but his confessional poems, like “Mechanism of Injury”—“Every time I restructure myself, I get broken and / separated. / I don’t know if I will make it. / Ashamed. / Vulnerable. / Naked”—have a gripping rawness that will resonate with any reader.
Intense, intimate, self-lacerating poetry about unhealed social and psychic wounds.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950730-06-3
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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