wanderlustlover's review against another edition
3.0
Thank you to Netgalley, University of Iowa Press, and Timothy Daniel Welch for this for-an-honest review early ARC!
--
"I am no authority on horizons,
the beginning or the end"
In the long run, I truly wanted to love this book more than I ended up loving it. I was quite excited to sink my teeth into a second book that was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Sadly, I constantly found myself putting this book down, or changing it out to read other books, text and audio. It is incredibly erudite and the author has an amazing vocabulary, but I didn't find myself feeling his words rise off the page or kindle anything to answer inside of me to his stories. I will be keeping this author and poet on my watch list, but this volume wasn't to my taste.
--
"I am no authority on horizons,
the beginning or the end"
In the long run, I truly wanted to love this book more than I ended up loving it. I was quite excited to sink my teeth into a second book that was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Sadly, I constantly found myself putting this book down, or changing it out to read other books, text and audio. It is incredibly erudite and the author has an amazing vocabulary, but I didn't find myself feeling his words rise off the page or kindle anything to answer inside of me to his stories. I will be keeping this author and poet on my watch list, but this volume wasn't to my taste.
pagesandprozac's review against another edition
2.0
"if a truth is ever told then no one can ever leave."
i always find it difficult to review poetry because often with poems, it either hits you or it doesn't, and you're never entirely sure why you responded in the way you did. poetry is possibly the most subjective of all literature. is it worth writing a review at all?
but i shall attempt.mostly because i got this from netgalley and you're supposed to review things you got from there.
there were a couple of nice lines scattered throughout this anthology, such as the aforementioned one, but overall i found the writing lacklustre, although that's probably just personal taste; i can be rather picky when it comes to modern poetry. finally, i get that the greek references were supposed to be postmodernist allusions, but to be honest it just felt to me like... doing it for the sake of it, or because he's got greek heritage. it didn't really have much of a poetical effect for me.
i always find it difficult to review poetry because often with poems, it either hits you or it doesn't, and you're never entirely sure why you responded in the way you did. poetry is possibly the most subjective of all literature. is it worth writing a review at all?
but i shall attempt.
there were a couple of nice lines scattered throughout this anthology, such as the aforementioned one, but overall i found the writing lacklustre, although that's probably just personal taste; i can be rather picky when it comes to modern poetry. finally, i get that the greek references were supposed to be postmodernist allusions, but to be honest it just felt to me like... doing it for the sake of it, or because he's got greek heritage. it didn't really have much of a poetical effect for me.
More...