Uncanny, heart-wrenching, and beautifully crafted poems by an original voice.
A 19th-century automaton and other museum exhibits narrate this collection of poems.
As Pennock explains in a note to readers, the “primary speaker of these poems is L’Automate D’Maillardet,” a mechanism built around 1800 by a Swiss clockmaker; it could produce drawings and poems. At some point, impresario P.T. Barnum acquired the automaton for his museum. Other Barnum exhibits also speak here, such as “Ned the Learnéd Seal” and the “Feejee Mermaid,” the first, a living trained animal and the second, a mummified monkey and fish sewn together. Often throughout the collection, winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award, beauty and the idea of beauty are corrupted by Barnum’s huckster grotesquerie. The mermaid is no lovely creature but a monstrous joining by someone who “smells of linen passed between / unwashed hands, and—strangely—of buttered popcorn.” The automaton is in love with the “One-Eyed Girl,” a ticket taker, his passion expressed in dignified and poetic terms. She’s like the moon, with “One unblinking eye, perfectly round, unblinking / The palest gold, with a hint of green.” As for Barnum, it’s rumored that he is responsible for the girl’s lost eye, having “done it himself, / gouged it out ’cause she wouldn’t be his whore.” Despair and rage inhabit these inventive and eerie poems. Looming over the moving collection is the fire that destroys the museum and horrifyingly kills its animals. Nevertheless, the speakers here—the damaged and abused; the dead, animal, or artificial—possess all the humanity and art, something Pennock’s language skillfully emphasizes through literary qualities like assonance, alliteration, and internal rhyme. On the automaton’s lovesickness, the Learnéd Seal predicts that “if this distemper / persists, first his imagination will dry.” To this, Barnum responds “with a solemn scratch / of” the Seal’s “head and a votive of cod.”
Uncanny, heart-wrenching, and beautifully crafted poems by an original voice.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-940724-29-4
Page Count: 94
Publisher: Gival Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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 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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