A heartfelt, humanist poetry collection that wears its eco-activism on its sleeve.
Armitage explores memory, loss, place, and the tension between nature and development in these 14 poems grounded in time and place.
While we live in a culture that worships technological advancement and everything futuristic, the tone early on in this collection is one of preservationist lament. “Intaglio” mourns cultural erasure along Route 66 of the Texas/New Mexico border, contrasting the past of Comanche “collecting plants for medicine bundles / their weapons striking the speaking rock” with modern-day generic signage. The speaker finds unexpected companionship in visiting a flightless ring-necked duck, “un- / assuming in his indigo necklace,” paddling in wastewater at a treatment plant in “Memory in Water” (the speaker muses, “My aloneness meets yours. / Yet I am less alone when you are here / and to be here you are less free.”) Rocking chairs become the conduit for familial memories in “Xylem and Phloem,” in which the speaker conjures her grandfather using his flexed foot to give her a pony ride in one seat and her great-great-grandmother quilting in another. The book concludes with “To Make a Prairie,” an elegy for a short-grass prairie once teeming with wildlife and medicinal and food plants that has been replaced by “widened, improved roads, electrical / towers, the steel will of development” and a “vacuous sky.” In this quietly passionate poetry collection, Armitage aims to preserve personal, geographical, and historical remnants of the world around her. The poet’s voice is warm and familiar while insisting on bearing witness to a world where our relationship to nature is irrevocably changing. The intimate connection between people and nature is evident in lines like, “I unfurl the hose, bring the holy water: / you tap an inner sweetness // in this supplicant turned steward, / in this gesture of love.” Even inanimate objects come alive, like a cedar chest described as a “yawning trove” in “hues of tree flesh.” However, the collection’s more experimental side may dissuade some readers from journeying further into the book.
A heartfelt, humanist poetry collection that wears its eco-activism on its sleeve.Pub Date: July 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798899900488
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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