elizabethlk's review
3.0
Splitting the Heart was a bit of a mixed bag for me, but it's more good than bad. Many of the poems covered their subjects beautifully and the poet has a great use of word flow that sounds great when read aloud. Some of the poems weren't stylistically my cup and I wasn't feeling them, but they didn't ruin the ones I liked or anything. The art on the cover is lovely, and created by the poet herself as well.
I tried not to take it too hard into consideration because I think it's out of my lane as the author is Mohawk and I am white, but the author refers to herself in a poem as being an "n-word" and I'm pretty sure non-Black writers should not be doing that. Mostly making note of this so readers are aware of its presence, and any reviewers for who this would be in the lane of can critique this aspect better than I could.
Anyway, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this one, but I wouldn't recommend against it either. There's quite a few really excellent poems in the collection and I'm sure there are readers that would enjoy this more than I did. Her lyrical word flow has me interested in potentially reading more of her work.
I tried not to take it too hard into consideration because I think it's out of my lane as the author is Mohawk and I am white, but the author refers to herself in a poem as being an "n-word" and I'm pretty sure non-Black writers should not be doing that. Mostly making note of this so readers are aware of its presence, and any reviewers for who this would be in the lane of can critique this aspect better than I could.
Anyway, I probably wouldn't go out of my way to recommend this one, but I wouldn't recommend against it either. There's quite a few really excellent poems in the collection and I'm sure there are readers that would enjoy this more than I did. Her lyrical word flow has me interested in potentially reading more of her work.
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