Dubris depicts dark scapes of 1979 New York City littered with lurid lullabies, sounded in symphonies of sirens. Walls bear the chalk-crafted poetry of extinction, written by the pale hand of an albino.

Ambulance-driving heroine Orlie Breton slithers through the implicitly illicit underbelly of the city, encountering characters whose complexity is a vivid as Dubris’ verse. Her days are filled with the rescue and tracking of skels, “the wounded or disbanded soldiers” passing themselves off as beggars. Their indentities derive from the verb, to skelder which Dubris reveals as a term of medieval proportions.

Orlie envelops herself in the text of the city—finding her way on foot: “So I headed north, away from the encampment, and for a block there was nothing. Then I saw words, mostly washed or worn away, but with one line still legible: WHO WILL REMEMBER THE STRANGE WAY OF CROWS?”

Haunted by riddles, Dubris’ Orlie traces truths from elevator shafts, broken wine bottles, and remnants of civilization. New York City tenement graffiti becomes primordial—a rosetta stone with which to unlock the city’s secrets.

Devour and savor Orlie’s tactile tribulation as she grapples with the meanings lurking within her ex-boyfriends’ Time Square holographic installation, the stillness of the morgue, flight from the law for saving a life illegally, and her final confrontation with herself as she entangles herself with a fugitive. Dubris is a modern day cave painter—her words resonate timelessly and should be translated rigorously like the most bewildering of hieroglyphs.