True rating 1.5/5. I wanted to like this. I really, really did. It's silly, but I feel bad for not liking it. Writing about trauma is just about one of the bravest, hardest things you can do as a poet, and at the same time, the most cathartic. So I wanted to fall in love with these poems.

But...this is peak Instapoetry, and not in the good way.

Don't get me wrong; I don't think Instapoetry is "not poetry". Some of it can grab you by the mind and splinter your heart into pieces with only a few lines. There are people who write in this...genre? movement?...who just nail it, you know? But Lovelace isn't one of them. I think she has the potential to be one of them, eventually (especially after finishing her second book, [b:The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One|35924698|The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One (Women Are Some Kind of Magic, #2)|Amanda Lovelace|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1502335293s/35924698.jpg|55649562] first); there were a few poems and lines where I would think "ooh, YES!", but they were few and far between.

Mostly this was just sentences of heavy-handed angst with many, many line breaks. Given the subject matter, you'd expect these poems to be gut-punchers, but the majority of them didn't really make me feel anything out of the ordinary, except empathy for a fellow survivor. That alone doesn't make a poem good. If some of them had been combined, perhaps, and presented more as prose, then I think it might have hit that target. But nope, line breaks and disjointed thoughts out the wazoo. (I actually found the constant line-breaking literally -- first meaning, not second -- headache-inducing to read, and I don't usually get headaches from reading.)

The final part of the book, "you", was an exercise in second-hand embarrassment for me. I felt like I was reading a handful of Tumblr posts, not poetry. (Cue the arguments about how "anything is poetry"; maybe so, but...doesn't that mean that nothing is poetry, then, as well?) I didn't really object to any of the ideas put forth in the poems, because you'd have to be a certain type of creep to, y'know, actively object to encouraging self-love or self-worth. It's that they were all presented so unoriginally. None of them were presented in ways I hadn't seen or read before, there were no new metaphors or wordplay or anything. It was just regurgitated Tumblr platitudes, basically.

Despite this, I think Lovelace has the ability to grow as a poet, because she displays two important things: a willingness to tackle the tough stuff, and a very obvious passion for her writing -- I think she's going to find her own groove and grow into it. That gives me hope for her later works, and I honestly am looking forward to what she produces in the future. It's been a while since I've given a book such a low rating and still wanted to read more from the author.