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laura_hirst_87's review against another edition
emotional
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
kaayleigh's review against another edition
challenging
reflective
3.5
Take a self-appreciation holiday. Build a fortress
around your best self. When you hear your worst
selves yelling from the ornamental moat of your
self-esteem, ghost them. No to selves that nibble
away like mice in the circuitry of your dreams! No
to selves that regurgitate Issues like it will nourish
you to eat them! Sabotage is often disguised.
Lots of the poems in this collection left me cold, but there were a few that were full of gorgeous evocative imagery, and I'll be thinking about them for a while. My favourites were Haunted, Small pebbles, She lacks confidence... (from which the quote above comes), Delphine is having a mani-pedi, and The garden.
around your best self. When you hear your worst
selves yelling from the ornamental moat of your
self-esteem, ghost them. No to selves that nibble
away like mice in the circuitry of your dreams! No
to selves that regurgitate Issues like it will nourish
you to eat them! Sabotage is often disguised.
Lots of the poems in this collection left me cold, but there were a few that were full of gorgeous evocative imagery, and I'll be thinking about them for a while. My favourites were Haunted, Small pebbles, She lacks confidence... (from which the quote above comes), Delphine is having a mani-pedi, and The garden.
amyotheramy's review against another edition
4.0
I wish I had invented the woman
(Yves Saint Laurent)
Never confuse aesthetic ghosts with the people you love.
Betrayal fades, loneliness is eternal. I am no longer concerned
with beauty, but with physical strength. Physical strength
is an unworn sensation. Over the years I have learned to create
a scandal -- terrible joy, a heaven of tranquilizers. I wish I had
known the indulgence of close contact with life; the encounter
of day for night. I have hunted down the false friendship
of the sun, sober. I emerged from solitude with many things,
spectacular concepts, all out of breath. The sea an extraordinary
denim. It's a love story of everything I didn't have.
If you are craving a sonnet, this will not be the book for you. This is all free verse, collage poems and the like. It admittedly indulges in some of free verse's worst indiscretions. (The very first poem in the book is printed in a perfect block of text with slashes where the line breaks should be. I glared at it very sternly and was relieved to find that that particular shenanigan was not often repeated.) And there are some very uneven works here. I want you to be aware of that. That said? I love what I love. You have but to say, "Betrayal fades. Loneliness is eternal" once, poem, and I am yours. There are many such moments, many such poems. This one is a keeper.
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