Town
Madeleine Slavick
Published by The Cuba Press, 2024
130pp
ISBN: 978-1-98-859576-4
Reviewed by Michael Elvy for Landfall Review Online, 30 June 2025
Reviewed by Paula Green for NZ Poetry Shelf , 10 May 2025
Fifty stories and fifty images by award-winning writer and photographer Madeleine Slavick.
In a valley along a highway, four consecutive towns, as if someone had once skipped a stone.
Each town takes its English name after a British man of the 1800s and offers free Wi-Fi.
Sunned dry mountains to the east, clouds clinging to damp ones in the west. Are we safe in the middle? Are we bored?
Welcome to Town, fifty stories and fifty images by writer and photographer Madeleine Slavick, who lived in Hong Kong for almost twenty-five years before moving to a Wairarapa country road that runs from state highway to bush.
“Town is reminiscent of Robert Hass at his most beautifully imagistic, or Georgia O’Keeffe telling deep stories in flowers.” — Hinemoana Baker
“town / ta℧n / n. 1 a An urban area that belongs to all of us, with a name, defined boundaries, and local government or, more precisely, the road I just walked … Slavick’s images and text are mutually supportive and distinct at the same time. She reminds us of how much is to be discovered if only we would stop and ponder. The road I just walked, I must walk again, with new eyes.” — Robin White
“At once humorous, poignant, arch, illuminating and matter-of-fact, Town gives you your hometown as if you had always remembered it that way yourself.” — Jillian Sullivan
“Slavick uses her eyes as a viewfinder, and language as film. She composes with conscience and sensitivity, in flashes of light and shadow, and finds a delicate access to sanity, and joy.” — Luo Hui