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jrosebartoli415's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Violence and War
Minor: Death and Chronic illness
Coronavirus pandemic descriptionsaeeklund's review
5.0
I'm still too tender to review this. It was breathtaking. Linda Gregerson handles living with the pandemic, our dying planet, historical atrocities, and "small" griefs and declines with such grace and care, balancing them with beauty and hope and resilience. I want to wrap myself up in her words and carry them with me as beacons. "and we / when grief has had its way with us, are / all the more / stubborn in matters of joy." Let us all be stubborn in matters of joy - this is my cry of defiance as I head into the new year.
elizaunderlined's review
I really don't want to rate this because I feel like it would be unfair to the author. Simply put, I just didn't get a lot of this poetry. It was very dense and often alluded to (I think) specific situations that I did not have the context to decipher.
Mostly, I found myself confused both with the subject matter of a poem and with the lines themselves. There will always be some formatting issues when putting poetry to e-book format, but one of the sentences I read said:
"I left her to the daily harms I might have seen them coming some of them one of the worst in any case and then but that was different then the illness that had only left me bitten took her altogether in its jaws."
What the hell did I just read? This is of course ommitting the line breaks, but even with the breaks this makes no sense to me. There is no punctuation and it just seems like gibberish. But I'm hesitant to judge it because perhaps the poem got jumbled when being put into this format? Unsure if I am just stupid or if this collection sways back and forth between nonsensical and pretentious.
Perhaps I'll revisit this some day when I have more brain cells at my disposal.
Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for the ARC of this book.
Mostly, I found myself confused both with the subject matter of a poem and with the lines themselves. There will always be some formatting issues when putting poetry to e-book format, but one of the sentences I read said:
"I left her to the daily harms I might have seen them coming some of them one of the worst in any case and then but that was different then the illness that had only left me bitten took her altogether in its jaws."
What the hell did I just read? This is of course ommitting the line breaks, but even with the breaks this makes no sense to me. There is no punctuation and it just seems like gibberish. But I'm hesitant to judge it because perhaps the poem got jumbled when being put into this format? Unsure if I am just stupid or if this collection sways back and forth between nonsensical and pretentious.
Perhaps I'll revisit this some day when I have more brain cells at my disposal.
Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for the ARC of this book.