Rin reviewed Love & Misadventure by Lang Leav
Review of 'Love & Misadventure' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
I've read dribs and drabs of Leav's poetry on Tumblr and other such online morasses, and witnessed some of her insecure (if not plain old toxic) behaviour towards people not praising her work to the sky, but still I picked this up. It was the internet picking on the worst stuff, right? It couldn't all be as bad as it seemed?
I was surprised! It wasn't! It was WORSE.
I'm kind of stunned that this puerile, largely cheesy dross got published, and not only that, that it was described as "evocative", and that Leav has an "an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers". I'm still not wholly sure this isn't some gigantic elaborate prank perpetuated by her publishers.
Who are these mysterious readers, just by the by? Because the only people I know who have this sort of juvenile and entitled outlook towards love …
I've read dribs and drabs of Leav's poetry on Tumblr and other such online morasses, and witnessed some of her insecure (if not plain old toxic) behaviour towards people not praising her work to the sky, but still I picked this up. It was the internet picking on the worst stuff, right? It couldn't all be as bad as it seemed?
I was surprised! It wasn't! It was WORSE.
I'm kind of stunned that this puerile, largely cheesy dross got published, and not only that, that it was described as "evocative", and that Leav has an "an unnerving ability to see inside the hearts and minds of her readers". I'm still not wholly sure this isn't some gigantic elaborate prank perpetuated by her publishers.
Who are these mysterious readers, just by the by? Because the only people I know who have this sort of juvenile and entitled outlook towards love and heartbreak are pre-teens, and I'm not precisely sure this is her target demographic. The immaturity of the way Leav attacks her subject made me wonder, a little guiltily, if I was being overly harsh towards a very young poet...and nope. Leav was 29 years old when she first published this. I'm kind of gobsmacked, to be honest.
(As I remarked to a fellow writer, if this sort of thing can get you published, then I'm going on a quest to find all the disastrous stuff I wrote when I was eleven, and will compile a bestseller of my own.)
Listen, I'm not against simplicity in poetry; simplicity can be a beautiful weapon when wielded skillfully -- look at Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" for the quintessential example of this -- but this isn't skillful; it's clumsy, childlike, and it's about as evocative as something on a Hallmark greeting card.
And sure, it's popular and it's made Lang Leav one of the darlings of the Instapoetry set. But that doesn't make it remotely good. If you've never read poetry before, don't cut your teeth on this garbage. Pick up [b:The Anatomy of Being|17729031|The Anatomy of Being|Shinji Moon|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1365016469s/17729031.jpg|24800666] by Shinji Moon instead, which is actually evocative and truly heart-rending.
