Critical Praise

"Dubris captures that hurried sense of absurdity that other authors, like Denis Johnson, have tackled in the emergency room-trauma story genre. And like Johnson, Dubris harnesses a dry, sick sense of humor... Skels conveys the overwhelming feelings one has during epic moments of tragedy."

——LA Weekly

"Maggie Dubris has saved a thousand lives, not only in the streets of Hell's Kitchen where we worked as paramedics, but in the breathtaking lines of this book. Her compassion is unmatched, tested on the hardest cases. Her poetry shines in the darkest places. My patron saint of suicide notes and crime scene confessions, of anguished letters written in the backs of ambulances."

——Joe Connelly, author of Bringing Out the Dead

"The narrator of Maggie Dubris's Skels, a New York City paramedic named Orlie Breton, is a naive poet from Ohio. It's the summer of 1978, and she works Harlem and Hell's Kitchen when she's not kicked down to the freaky morgue shift. Orlie also follows around a homeless albino poet, trading riddles written on the walls of abandoned railway tunnels. Her boyfriend takes way too much acid and becomes a magician of holographs in Times Square. Orlie is a screw-up and then a cover-of-the-tabloids heroine -and she meets Walt Whitman. Meantime, Dubris hasn't even broken a sweat in the writing. Her New York has everything and nothing to do with the real world, which is a reminder of something very simple: books don't need to get all pompous about our social disasters in order to make the grandest possible statements about them. Skels floats completely free of those painful, tiresome conversations about who we're supposed to be and who we have to be. On a hot Manhattan night, with hydrants pumping in the streets and the sirens Dopplering off, Orlie's in the same ambulance with the rest of us, unconcerned with being a subject, an object, a woman, a character."

——The New York Times Book Review

"A vivid and poetic novel that tells the story of a young EMT plunged into the jungle that is New York City in the steamy summer of 1979. With every call to save a life, Maggie Dubris-who worked as a 911 paramedic in Harlem and Hell's Kitchen throughout the '80s and '90s-enters a different and strange world…. A vivid rendering of the lives of New York's poorest and most invisible."

——The New York Post