A review by octavia_cade
Monstrum Poetica by Jezzy Wolfe

dark informative mysterious medium-paced

3.0

This collection of horror poems is organised as a bestiary - each entry comprises a short introduction on the type of creature featured, followed by several poems on that creature. I happen to love bestiaries, so points for that. I did enjoy that some of the monsters were distinctly unfamiliar to me; I'd never heard of the Melon Heads before, for instance. And in general I enjoyed the poems, which were highly alliterative (to the point where I started to wonder how much alliteration was in my own poems!). However, for me, one of the reasons I like poetry and read so much of it is poetry's ability to say multiple things at once. With the really good poems, I can read them over and over again and find different meanings each time. All too frequently here, though, the poems were almost more descriptive, more lyrical recaps of their introductions, and I found myself ultimately more interested in the interplay between poem and introduction than I was in the actual poems.