Reviews

The Aqua Notebook by Tasha Cotter

dejunker's review

5.0

Poetry and story all in one book. This series of poems, only separated and titled by the dates spaced throughout a year, was surprising for me. First , that each poem didn’t follow any rules of poetry I had learned. I’ve seen similar work in “The New Yorker” and other magazines. Now a whole book that I followed, understood, and it made me think has taught me my education in poetry has been sorely limited. Second, that the poems as a whole were a coherent story really surprised and moved me. I feel this is a book I’ll come back to for randomly looking at individual poems while remembering the overall story. My only negative is I felt too many selections were rewordings of the same idea. The poems, then, are a bit repetitious at times but that very fact is a point to be made, too. I read a free LibraryThing Early Reviewers edition; if it hadn’t been free, I wouldn’t have read it but now I would pay for it.