An uneven but searching debut whose best poems make faith feel like a bodily, troubled, and still-moving endeavor.
Cummings’ debut poetry collection follows the theme of faith as it relates to embarrassment, inheritance, and fatigue.
Across poems set in hunting grounds, factory floors, dorm walkways, family tables, and passenger seats, Cummings presents belief as something tested by labor, shame, grief, and bodily vulnerability. In “Gutshot II (Imprecision),” a wounded deer and the speaker’s failure to leave the scene quickly turn a hunting memory into an extended reckoning with guilt. “Gridiron” considers adulthood through dried spit, debt, energy drinks, and punishing work, making usefulness feel both necessary and punitive. The quieter “Endodus” measures estrangement through folding chairs, unfinished boxes, delayed calls, and an empty passenger seat, allowing domestic objects to register what its speaker cannot directly say. Elsewhere, the collection approaches faith and inheritance through damaged or discarded things: books rotting in a dumpster, a cafeteria spoon snapped and hidden under bread, and a torn seam repaired by a grandmother’s thread. Cummings also moves beyond conventional lyric forms, incorporating search results, code fragments, shaped devotional pieces, and compressed poems that mimic prayer, testimony, or interrupted thought: “But then how can I be great and remain a man of God? // Or is that the point? / To stand upright by bowing lower.” Again and again, the book returns to repair—spiritual, familial, and material—while acknowledging how often repair remains partial or deferred. The poet’s advantage in these pages is not certainty, though the book is often drawn toward it, but the intimacy established between spiritual pressure and daily texture. The formal experiments lend the book a productive unevenness, though some conceits could be pressed further and made even stranger. At times, the collection closes its own wounds too quickly, particularly around sin, redemption, and national violence. Still, its best passages exert a durable pull, making faith feel less like an answer than an appetite for repair.
An uneven but searching debut whose best poems make faith feel like a bodily, troubled, and still-moving endeavor.Pub Date: May 9, 2026
ISBN: 9798252515007
Page Count: 77
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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