Bookish Thoughts

Like most of the nation, I heard Amanda Gorman read this poem at Biden's inauguration. I was inspired and moved hopeful for the future. When I saw this book at the used book store, I had to grab it. It's a quick read, but it remains an inspiring and healing one. And I'm glad to have it on my shelf so I can revisit it whenever I feel the need.

I wish I read more poetry. Sometimes I come across one that cuts right to my core or perfectly sums up what I'm feeling and it's wonderful. When you relate to a poem like that there's this wonderful feeling of connection and the loneliness lifts a little bit. But poems can also be dense or obscure. When you get it, you get it. When you don't, it can take a lot of work. The solution, of course, is to read more poetry. Practice and familiarity will make it easier to understand them. And they're short. So I bought a book of Mary Oliver's poems, which are at least modern and fairly accessible. I read a few every night before going to sleep, which was a good way to work through it. I can't read more than a few at a time. But this let me digest them, and I ended up really liking most of them. And a few were exactly what I needed to read, which is what I'd been hoping for. I should really keep this up. Poetry before bed seems like a good habit to get in to.

This is such a short book, made shorter by the fact that it's poetry rather than prose and each poem is presented in both Spanish and English. I still barely finished it. I keep wanting to read more poetry, and sometimes I do come across poems that speak to me. But these weren't them. I really tried to give this collection a shot, to linger over the poems rather than speeding through them. But Neruda's work just isn't for me.

I've definitely read The Odyssey before. It was an assignment in the Classical Mythology class I took in college. But I think I fought my way through it in high school, too. I think it might have been half the reason I signed up for that course. But even in taking that course I had a hard time keeping all the different gods and heroes and stories straight, and over the years it's all become a muddled mess in my brain. I knew the key points: Calypso, Cyclops, the shroud Penelope was pretending to weave. Most of it had fallen out of my memory, though. And then Emily Wilson released a new translation last year that everyone got really excited about. The first translation to English by a woman! A newly readable version! I had to give this epic poem another try. I'm glad I read it. Particularly because I had forgotten over half of what happened. All the exciting bits of Odysseus' journey are confined to about 4 chapters. The remaining 21 chapters are taken up by lots of ...

I've been hearing good things about Jacqueline Woodson's memoir in verse since before it came out. It won so many awards that you practically can't see the original cover anymore. I'm so glad I finally got around to reading it. While this book is technically marketed towards children (it's recommended for ages 10 and up), it works incredibly well no matter what age you are. Woodson focuses on her time as a child. She was born in Ohio, but she left when she was barely a year old. She and her siblings lived with their grandparents in South Carolina for several years before her mother moved them all to Brooklyn. But this isn't just about Woodson either. There's an incredible sense of family and history in these pages, and it's clear that this has had a profound effect on Woodson and her sense of place in the world. A lot of the book takes place before she's even born or could possibly have memories, which is a bit unusual for a memoir. She talks abo...

This is a hugely divisive collection of poetry written by a young woman and dealing mainly with the trauma she suffered as a child and teenager. There's a lot of trauma to unpack - an abusive mother, an eating disorder, possible sexual assault, losing family members to cancer and suicide within a month of each other. And Amanda Lovelace does a decent job of distilling that to a handful of words, which I suppose is what poetry is all about. At the same time, this whole collection felt a little lazy and immature to me. These poems were reminiscent of the stuff I wrote in high school and posted on ffn. I'm honestly a little surprised this got published. It might just be that this is intended for a younger audience - like those Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul books. Remember those? If you liked Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul  and want basically that in poetry form, this is probably the book for you. If you're looking for something more mature or polished, skip this co...