On Nicolette Polek's 'Bitter Water Opera'

In Nicolette Polek’s debut novel Bitter Water Opera, there is a woman who leaves her husband by taking one object from their apartment each day and stashing it in the base of an abandoned water tower. Her husband doesn’t notice his wife’s quiet, gradual departure because he’s too busy staring at his reflection in a gold-framed mirror — until that’s gone, too. “You can’t leave something that way,” the narrator, Gia, tells the woman, and then adds only to the reader: “even though I didn’t know what the right way would be.” This is one of many strikingly beautiful insights held within the 122-page wonder.