Elizabeth's City

Elizabeths City is Kansas City or the raw part of it new to suburban James who falls in love with both city and Liz. Though James loses his innocence it is well-lost because Kevin Rabas is more interested in how James comes into experience into the fierce grip of forces larger than himself into language into the story and stories he will carry like his drums through the rest of his life. Elizabeths City is a wonderfully haunting portrait of a person a place and the permanence of impermanence.--Thomas Fox Averill O. Henry Award winner whose most recent novel is Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr University of New Mexico PressIn Kevin Rabass Elizabeths City Rabas writes in the zeitgeist of Kansas City in the Nineties to show us this city where James can only be a visitor of in a coming-of-age story. From his suburb life James is Downtown for the college but the true lessons come from Elizabeths Kansas City a city of jazz and an underground arts scene where artists are impoverished gritty only trying to make ends meet. We too are lessoned in these blocks of clubs and coffee houses a city before any KC Crossroads Arts District or Power & Light District a Kansas City before the reconstruction and full gentrification of today. Yes this is Elizabeths City James leads us through an adventure down--through roads of promise streets of struggle and alleyways of elegy. -Dennis Etzel Jr. My Grunge of 1991