Reviews

Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa

hsienhsien27's review against another edition

4.0

Tocqueville was a pretty fun poetry collection because it was poetry but at the same time it wasn’t. This collection was avant-garde at it’s best. Meandering and sure of itself, satirical but stern with some low political whispers about being Brown and Muslim. Sometimes it was documentation, journal entries of rantlings about scenery, war, and people and oppression, but also the daily rhythms of life. And then sometimes it will take a turn and somehow become a noir film. It’s metafiction in poetry, a novella in the guise of verse. It felt like a dream of a James Bond movie on a staticky beat up TV, where Bond isn’t White with blue eyes and he’s super awkward and has a thing for computer science and fun facts.

Rating: 5/5

Notes on the Shore

jjreads331's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

2.75

I appreciated some of the poetic forms and there were a few lines that struck me. I remember reading this collection once before, years ago, but I have now since read poetry that I like more, so this feels less impressive than I remembered it being.