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.
• Recipient of the "Award for Literary Innovation" from the 2025 Wolf Media Festival
• Long-listed for a Chanticleer Novella Prize.
Coming Summer, 2026
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.
New gothic horror novel plays with sonnet structure
by Emily Rodin of Community News Service
Review of Leeds Point
by daithí (for Poetry Society of Vermont)
Cindy Ellen Hill has just finished a gothic epic, Leeds Point: a Gothic Novel in Verse, cloaked in both history and narrative power. Its 300 + pages is staggering because it is rendered in verse. This is not surprising. Cindy Ellen Hill’s background lends itself to poetry, for she is an accomplished singer and musician. Remember: there was a time when poetry shared with others was sung in villages or courtyards. Once you have the book in hand, I suggest you do two things: that you read the first section out loud. Cindy’s craft is stitched with constant and sometimes hidden rhymes, rich images, and suspenseful incidents. You should gather around a camp fire on a clear moonlit night. Then, begin the story of Esther, a young maiden, torn from her home and left alone on a foreign shore to fend for herself. The forsaken maid has a horrifying story to share that far surpasses one’s imagination. There are so many layers and nuances in Leeds Point, but I especially want to tell you that Cindy Ellen’s descriptions of nature really stood out for me and are entrancing. Having spent time as a child in the Pine Barrens, the poet brings out what at first appears desolate but later becomes a stark beauty. Not only does she guide us through the plants and trees along the shore but also the animals are given time to suss what humans might intend for them. So much of Leeds Point takes place in a void. Just think of stories that you know that take place on the edge of a forest or along the banks of a river. It is a place where monsters emerge when you least expect them–a borderless spot that is yet to be clearly defined, plotted, or owned. It is a place of immense possibilities, where different people and groups interact to make sense of one another–or to commodify them. Needless to say, Esther’s struggles in a New World order has not really changed for those of us in the 21st century. And you might consider forming a book group to read and discuss the challenges the heroine faces. At the back of the book, Cindy shares what she researched over years for the historic background of the story. Also, there are excellent questions for any book group that wishes to plummet the depths of this epic. (Note: Cover art by Charlie Adams, Pondwater Studio. The book should be available on or around June 30. For updates, go to either cindyellenhill.com or selkiesongspress.com )
Advance Praise for
Leeds Point...
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, a novel in sonnet verse, had my literal ear throughout with the musicality and rhythm that stayed with me long after reading. Myth, history and the author’s childhood fears coalesce into a wild ride of a novel that had me first rooting for Esther, then cheering her on as she transformed from a petrified, abandoned wife left alone in an unknown world to a hardened but determined force of nature.
Liz Collins, Author of Whalespeak
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
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
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.
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
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