Poetry

Review Thanks to my friend Erin for loaning me this book! Standard disclaimer about poetry: I don’t know anything about it and am rating based on my response. I liked these! Not as much as I did The Sun & Her Flowers, but still. I thought the poems dealing with themes of trust, belief, self-compassion, and acceptance were my favorites (list of page numbers at end). There are several that speak to Kaur’s experience as an immigrant, particularly as a child. While I don’t relate to the immigrant experience, a lot of them felt familial to growing up very poor. I related to those aspects, both the experiences of them and the sensitivies and anxieties the experiences leave you with. Several I really did not quite get / they did not speak to me at all. That’s okay. I bumped on a few. That’s okay too! ...

Table of Poems Title Page Flag Poem. (cornflakes) 31 Favorite Daggers. 74 Favorite Poem. (rip) 86 Favorite “Let him go in mind” 91 Favorite True Homosexual Love. 105 Favorite Dear Friend Go Away, Please. 106 Favorite There You Go Baby. 148 Favorite He is a Rose. 155 Favorite New brave wired ones. 24 Poem Queers 35 Poem How Odd. 43 Poem “soon the mind will be heavy” 62 Poem I Tell You Now. 65 Poem From Hospital. 67 Poem Bootless. 70 Poem “Two queers live on a hill” 80 Favorite “oral pictures of love” 93 Poem Nerves Blotted Out. 108 Poem “I love my arse to be sucked” 112 Poem “desert bones” 114 Poem All Sunday Long. 122 Poem Radio-Me: The Big Send Up of Everything Around Us. 130 Poem “The world is at war” 139 Poem To my mother, dead. 141 Poem Looking for a Poem. 20 Stanza Between You and Humanity. 21 Stanza “I can’t sell my penis because” 41 Stanza This Poem. 54 Stanza Answer don’t move. 119 Stanza Reatity. 127 Stanza I am frozen with knowledge. 148 Stanza Review I picked this up from the bookstore after loving Love Leda so much. I have been trying to read a little more poetry. Like my recent review for Rupi Kaur’s The Sun & Her Flowers, I have no idea how to review poetry. I don’t know what good poetry looks like or what bad poetry looks like. All I know is that sometimes words are strung together and they give me an emotional reaction. So that’s what I’m rating this collection on. ...

I am not a great lover of poetry and am usually stumped by it. Historically if poetry isn’t a haiku or in iambic pentameter I am a little too dumb to read it, because I don’t know how to make it sound in my inner voice. Don’t ask me to read it out loud. I am self-conscious of this blind spot. I tried reading The Waste Lands last year and was totally bumfuzzled by it. ...