These poems offer honest, tender, and sometimes painful observations that are as universal as they are personal.
Bernardo presents a collection of bittersweet reflections on change, motherhood, and loss.
If one central theme can be gleaned from Bernardo’s poetry in this collection, it’s the idea of transformation. The opening poem, “Breakage,” meditates on a bird’s nest as a metaphor for personal loss: “She wonders still / how to unfall the nest, / unshatter the egg.” “She Is Not” features a woman who vows to use her pain productively. “She Is Stillness” celebrates surrender, while “Hands on Heart and Belly” embraces embodiment. “Seasoned” explores a woman’s identity in strong animal metaphors through spring (fox), summer (honeybee), fall (fawn), and winter (bear). The poet’s family of origin and her created family are central to many poems as well. For example, she explores her tumultuous childhood and her parents’ marital strife in “Air Plant.” Providing care for a mother with dementia consumes the poet in “A Plague Upon Us” and “This Is a House of Dying.” The juxtaposition of love and helplessness is evident in poems about motherhood, such as “Near Drowning,” where the speaker seemingly seethes at her husband after their toddler narrowly cheats death: “I hate you for taking life for granted, like / a free balloon from the grocery store.” In “Water and the Witch,” the poet and her 7-year-old son angrily explode “like potatoes in the microwave” after she tries to toss him into the pool—and ends up in the water with him. She even takes readers back to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which she recounts her teenage son’s personal struggles in “Barnacles and Blessings.”
Bernardo gives readers an intimate glance into her life over many years in this collection. Poems such as “Tombstone” capture difficult decisions anchored in love, like sending her son to a ranch for boys with addiction issues: “We were dealing with a terrorist / who’d taken our child hostage. So we / sent him away.” The excitement of new love is palpable in “First Kiss,” which recounts “driving home my heart is open like my windows.” Erotic undertones are effective in poems like “Rock and Water,” which describes how “he catches me, strong and hard, spins me high / with a swirl of foam.” Imagery is almost always vivid and unforgettable, like a mattress “dipped on both sides like two / serving spoons laid out on either side of a carving knife.” While the book’s tone is serious, the poet does inject some humor in “The Care and Feeding of a Poet,” a faux instruction manual for creatives: “Some poets are easily bored and require / constant stimulation or they become self-destructive.” Ultimately, the collection succeeds as a testimony of crisis turned chrysalis: “I have evolved / into a creature who can fly / even after her heart is pierced.” However, some poems are too on the nose, like “You Can Grow Your Own Way,” which uses an unconventional garden as a metaphor for personal growth. These poems offer honest, tender, and sometimes painful observations that are as universal as they are personal.Pub Date: July 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781951297046
Page Count: 102
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2026
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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