A richly realized set of poems about the majesty of the present.
Foley interrogates the speed of life in her latest poetry collection.
Set in changing seasons and landscapes of New England, these poems are replete with reminders of time’s passage—whether the speaker chooses to confront them or not. Sometimes they opt for the latter, as when they spy the skeleton of a deer on the roadside in “Intuition”: “I...didn’t stop to wonder / where the flesh had gone… / Didn’t pause to ponder / its change from leaping-warmth / to cold, clean bones.” Other moments provide space for meditation on the fleeting quality of life, referring to a game of Scrabble, a Zen ordination, or a poetry group meeting for the first time since the death of a friend. Foley seems to have a soft spot for nature’s smallest creatures, and they often help to bring out her deeper feelings. “Ode to a Wasp” elegizes an insect that’s drowned in hot chai. Other speakers peer into a hive of numerous bees they keep on their property (“Of Thirty Thousand”) or buy lilies for a monarch butterfly who hasn’t migrated south. (A subsequent poem mourns the insect’s passing: “face pressed into the New Year’s daisy / I gave him, as a human lover might.”) Serious events evoke even greater expressions of wonder and fear. A mother’s stroke transforms a speaker from an atheist back to a religious believer in “Radiance”: “it sent me / to my knees pleading, / hands clasped like a penitent / or a medieval saint transported / to the modern age.” Multiple poems chronicle moments with a young granddaughter, providing ways of thinking about the past, present, and future all at once.
Foley has a superb eye for the encapsulating image, the pivotal instant. Her lyrics capture worlds that others might overlook, as in “Lost and Found,” which chronicles a high school field trip to tide pools on the Massachusetts shore. The young narrator is so enraptured by the pools and their contents that they miss the ostensible lesson. Back at school, the speaker ponders: “I couldn’t calculate the pitch of waves, / or chemical composition of anything, / but I knew how to lose myself / in the world of tiny shifting things.” The verses are spare and measured, but even the shortest manages to craft emotionally resonant narratives. The wider world occasionally intrudes—the speaker’s perspective is shifted by hearing a Somali refugee give a talk or by thinking about migrant children separated at the border—but generally, the social circle is small and the natural world close at hand. Though the threat of loss—of people, of memories—is always circling, the greatest risk is failing to live in the moment, every precious second of it. In “The Orchard on Its Way,” for example, the poet limns the fleetingness of a train journey with hallmark elegance: “I wish it would slow / not the train…but the passing / into memory—I want it all / to last.”
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 71
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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