Elizabeth’s City

Elizabeth’s 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. Elizabeth’s 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 Press

In Kevin Rabas’s Elizabeth’s 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 Elizabeth’s 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 Elizabeth’s 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