A sometimes-insightful, if slightly uneven, collection that catalogs a journey from devastation to renewal.
A personal book of poems about overcoming adversity and rediscovering oneself.
This collection focuses on themes of metamorphosis. The first section, “Suffering,” opens with “Weathering the Storm Another Day,” a poem about a contentious relationship in which the speaker refuses to participate anymore. “Cut the Power” describes an effort to leave the past behind and begin again with a clean slate. The speaker of “Gray Is a Warning To Heed” metaphorically evicts a toxic person from their being, and another wrestles with isolation in “Loneliness Called, She Wants You Back.” Zan employs a baseball metaphor to describe a failure at love and a willingness to try again in “Divorce, America’s Favorite Pastime.” A classmate who killed herself is the subject of “Sharing Aloneness With Willa.” The “Scars” section kicks off with “I Became From Where I Am,” a poem about identity and family. In the “Salve” section, the speakers experience a sort of rebirth, reuniting with friends, experimenting with makeup, basking in nature, and opening up to love again. The poet ends the collection on an uplifting note—joyful, determined, and “braving a future unknown.” Zan chooses her words carefully, using vibrant verbs and sensual adjectives, as when she describes how a speaker’s “skin singes,” the “bourbon-orange glow of the sun,” the “velvety / warmth” of coffee, or an embrace “enclosing me like a / weighted blanket.” She also shows a brave vulnerability; the speaker of “10 Truths: If I’m Being Honest,” for example, unleashes a slew of unflattering confessions, including a desire to be anorexic, a contemplation of suicide, and a wish that a husband was dead. Another work, “There Lived a Girl on Birch Lane,” takes on the perspective of a teen who gave up a child for adoption as it explores a theme of abandonment. But the book occasionally veers into melodramatic territory in self-pitying stanzas such as “No one sees / how do I start? / to describe the pain / of my folded heart.” There are a few clichéd similes, as well, including “I savored you like a filet mignon.”
A sometimes-insightful, if slightly uneven, collection that catalogs a journey from devastation to renewal.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-753604-3
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Turtle Cove Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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