Coming Summer, 2026
• Recipient of the "Award for Literary Innovation" from the 2025 Wolf Media Festival
• Long-listed for a Chanticleer Novella Prize.
As an ARC reader, you’ll receive an early digital copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. Your reviews, recommendations, and enthusiasm make a huge difference to independent authors and small presses.
When Esther Water’s new-world sea-captain husband abandons her in the salt marsh of the coastal West Jersey colony in 1702, Esther must fend for herself against hunger, accusations of witchcraft, and an angered Leni Lenape serpent god. Learning that her husband made his fortune through slave-trading and by murdering his prior wives, Esther’s young heart hardens. After a fatal show-down, Esther embraces her husband’s immorally-achieved gains, turns against her friends and allies, and prepares to develop the marshland into a gleaming city, relishing the entitlement and privilege she gained through inherited wealth built on the capital of slavery and stolen land. The novel's gothic arc is fulfilled as the feminist anti-hero ultimately becomes the monster.
Leeds Point is a gothic horror novel in sonnet verse set in the isolated coastal marsh off New Jersey in 1702. The story interweaves Leni Lenape folklore and the origin story of the Jersey Devil, and richly engages the natural and contemporary literary realms; osprey, rabbit and fox, along with the works of Newton, Donne, and Milton, all play vital speaking roles. As the consequences of the Glorious Revolution unfold, and Englad releases its crown monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade, Leeds Point depicts the role slavery, religious conflict, and environmental destruction played in the shaping of early America.
Written after five years of intensive historical research and field work (camping in the swamp, seriously) arising out of the author’s love for the southern New Jersey coastal marshes where she was born, Leeds Point holds the enchantment of literary gothic horror tales like the Scarlet Letter and Kirsten Bakis’s contemporary works King Nyx and Lives of the Monster Dogs. Its atemporal meta-scenes give it experimental vibes not unlike Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, and its immersion in the natural environment invokes Max Porter’s Lanny.
Advance Praise for
Leed's Point...
Cindy Ellen Hill’s novel-in-verse Leeds Point astonished me with its range, violence, beauty, and lyrical intelligence. Set in the marshlands of New Jersey in 1702, this novel painfully depicts the violence of colonialism and the violence towards women that has been part of our nation from its founding. But it also maps a different world: the interspecies and interracial kinship and care that exists at our society’s peripheries and margins. This book-length sonnet had me reading deep into the night, and feeling attuned and connected to our vast interspecies web of helpers, kin, and fen.
Robin Marie MacArthur—author, Half Wild and Heart Spring Mountain
In Leeds Point, Cindy Ellen Hill successfully tackles the challenges of not only telling a complex, multi-layered story, but telling it in sonnet verse. "Verse!" you might say. But this novel’s a page-turner. The verse, with its lovely turns of phrase and stunning depictions of the natural world, actually propels the reader through the novel from beginning to end. I didn’t want it to end.
Buffy Aakaash—author, Breaking and Untangling the Knots
This is the research-based, novel-length poem we didn't know we needed. Despite being almost completely made out of sonnets, it is a wholly modern, intersectional feminist tour-de-force.
Jessy Randall
—author, The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science
Imagine a novel in sonnet verse as radical genre-bender and breathtaking page-turner. Such is the feat of hybrid wizardry Cindy Hill—visionary poet, storyteller, time-traveler, heartbreaker—achieves in this stunning creation. Sail back to the dawn of the 18th century, to New Jersey’s wild salt marshes, with Hill and her trailblazing heroine for this brilliantly marvelous, darkly prescient and searingly human odyssey.
Ellen Lesser, author, The Shoplifter's Apprentice and The Blue Streak
Leeds Point is an epic tale written in poetic verse of a young woman’s fearless struggle to survive when her evil husband, a sea captain, abandons her in 1702 to die in an immense coastal swamp in the territory of New Jersey. The story reads like a diary:
“I sit here alone. My husband’s main mast/
disappears into the mist of this vast/
living prison in which I have been caught/
like a fish in a net.”
Cindy Ellen Hill has crafted a vivid reminder of the terrible costs of colonial conquest and exploitation – particularly the slave trade and forcing native people to flee their homelands or hide or die. Hill’s creation is so compelling and moves with such non-stop action and tension that I’m not sure what to call the form in which it’s written, other than astonishing.
Lyn Bixby, author The Pacifist
Leeds Point is a wild toad’s ride of a narrative poem set in New Jersey’s 1700s coastal marshlands and pine barrens. Hill draws you in like Scheherazade with her cautionary allegorical tale. Her fascinating characters journey through a mesmerizing weave of Lenape and “Jersey Devil” myths mixed with colonial tall tales and stunning passages of historical realism. Hill captures your ear, heart, and mind with intricate prosody and rhyme schemes that echo the warnings of Atwood, Hawthorne and Melville. The narrative’s truths and revelations of our nation’s dark roots in slavery, violence, unfettered capitalism, and gendered oppression will haunt you.
Basil T. Paquet—poet, co-founder and editor of 1st Casualty Press, publisher of and contributor to Winning Hearts and Minds, War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and Free Fire Zone: Short Stories by Vietnam Veterans.