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nosferatchew's review
“We imagine a funeral each time we peel back fresh need: wait for me, it’s cold, I’m scared. Maybe the trade-off for resurrection is shame vast enough to kill us & that becomes another execution to tongue our way out of. Look. Here are primal & ungainly ways we tether ourselves to the earth.”
“I want these facts to mean something to each other the way a room is just a room until love or its inverse tells me what to do with the person standing in it.”
“Who can deny having tried to summon love from air with teeth alone? We return
& she muscles back from the dead, trembles until some god bestows the mercy
of a palm upon her head. After years of this it must be easy to mistake hell for an empty room.”
“I want these facts to mean something to each other the way a room is just a room until love or its inverse tells me what to do with the person standing in it.”
“Who can deny having tried to summon love from air with teeth alone? We return
& she muscles back from the dead, trembles until some god bestows the mercy
of a palm upon her head. After years of this it must be easy to mistake hell for an empty room.”
akhudson's review
I enjoyed the poems that I read, but they were very dark and I found it hard to sit down and read more than one at a time. Had checked it out from the library so ended up having to return it before I could finish.
joever's review
5.0
A joke I was once told goes, I didn’t choose this life, this life chose me. Fuck that. Choose a hell of your own making over the hell that unmakes you. Flower a garden of rage & eat & eat & eat.
fkshg8465's review against another edition
dark
emotional
inspiring
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Beautiful poetry written so hauntingly and uniquely and yet also completely familiar to who I am and am not.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Animal death, Dementia, Cancer, Death, Racism, Xenophobia, and Hate crime
blairlovesbooks's review
3.0
When even the description is esoteric, you know you’re in for an annoying poetic experience.
The good: Wee’s arrangement of poetry is purposeful and inventive (in particular the crossword puzzle). The groupings of words themselves didn’t feel particularly meaningful, but that’s not to say clear emotional or syntactical patterns wouldn’t emerge with more careful reading.
I really liked specific poems. Wee’s exploration of the immigrant experience and her relationship to her Sayang were particularly moving. However, many of the poems tried VERY hard to obscure their messaging through overly-wry turns of phrase or imagery that bordered on surrealism.
For a long time I wouldn’t admit to disliking surrealism, because I worried my dislike came from an intellectual insecurity. This anthology helped me realize surrealism bothers me because it gives the reader little to grasp in the way of emotional substance. It feels like cartoonish obfuscation, designed to assert the superiority of the writer through purposeful confusion of the reader. While this work didn’t go all the way to Samuel Beckett, many moments felt frustratingly diverted away from the real emotion into something dreamy enough to dilute it. Typically by the end of the poem, Wee would show a peek at the point, but it wasn’t enough to save the poem for me.
The good: Wee’s arrangement of poetry is purposeful and inventive (in particular the crossword puzzle). The groupings of words themselves didn’t feel particularly meaningful, but that’s not to say clear emotional or syntactical patterns wouldn’t emerge with more careful reading.
I really liked specific poems. Wee’s exploration of the immigrant experience and her relationship to her Sayang were particularly moving. However, many of the poems tried VERY hard to obscure their messaging through overly-wry turns of phrase or imagery that bordered on surrealism.
For a long time I wouldn’t admit to disliking surrealism, because I worried my dislike came from an intellectual insecurity. This anthology helped me realize surrealism bothers me because it gives the reader little to grasp in the way of emotional substance. It feels like cartoonish obfuscation, designed to assert the superiority of the writer through purposeful confusion of the reader. While this work didn’t go all the way to Samuel Beckett, many moments felt frustratingly diverted away from the real emotion into something dreamy enough to dilute it. Typically by the end of the poem, Wee would show a peek at the point, but it wasn’t enough to save the poem for me.
baileaves's review
2.0
Honestly i think this just went over my head. Some of the poems were beautiful but many of them were just formatted too confusingly to enjoy.