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A review by kyatic
Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota by Amelia Gorman
3.0
(Review of an ARC received via Netgalley)
I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.
I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.
This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.
I'm not sure how to feel about this one! In many ways I loved it, and in many other ways it left me a little cold. Gorman's use of language is beautiful and every poem is obviously very carefully crafted, not a single word wasted, which is a nice contrast to a lot of the more raw and unedited poetry that we tend to see these days (which is its own separate art form and in no way inferior!) I really loved some of the poems in here, particularly the first one, Brittle Naiad, but then others just didn't really resonate with me at all, perhaps because I didn't have a reference point for them, living halfway across the world and being entirely unfamiliar with the organisms she was writing about. I actually read the Author's Note first and I feel like this helped to give necessary context to the writing, but I wish that hadn't been necessary; without that context, a lot of the poems really didn't mean a lot to me.
I did really like the sci-fi / dystopian element that Gorman wove into the natural world, and thought this was particularly effective when she didn't make it explicit that the poems were set in the future. I liked the duality of the poems that could either be set in our time and our world, or on another planet entirely; for me, those best encapsulated the inherent oddity of nature, and really brought home the alien characteristics of many of the things we consider normal.
This is a strong collection of poems by a writer I'll definitely be looking into in the future, and I really do think that its main drawback is also its biggest strength; it's just so niche that there are going to be some people who absolutely adore it, but for those of us who are coming to it without the weight of pre-existing knowledge, it's not the most accessible.