The Long Pause and the Short Breath

A stunning debut collection of poems and photography that will make you pause and take your breath away.

"This Corona pause

will be a marker

on our collective timeline,

like pre and postwar buildings

comingled on the avenues in New York City,

that are blatant but quiet monuments

to another grand before and after."

With a keen artist's eye and laser sharp insights, Nicole Freezer Rubens takes you inside the pandemic bubble of New York City through the lockdown, the endless sirens, the protests, the salutes to those who cared for us, the loss of lives and freedoms, and then out the other side when the quarantine was finally lifted. The stark and often shocking beauty of her photographs tell the story of a city on pause-but it's the photos combined with the poetry that speaks volumes of lives upended that takes your breath away.  You'll be swept up in a tidal wave of emotions and a love story to the "eternal flame of New York City that can never be extinguished."

Nicole Freezer Rubens is a native New Yorker who with her husband raised their three daughters there as well. She studied studio art, art history, creative writing and photography, and following a career in the art world, launched her own boutique interior design firm.