A review by kenfoxley
oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems by C. Russell Price

challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense fast-paced

2.0

I wanted to like this so much, I really did. It's written by genderqueer author C. Russell Price, and it's a collection of poetry about sexual identity and gender discovery, but I just... did not like it. There are parts of it I did enjoy, especially the way it's written and the execution of the layout of the book and how each chapter is divided by words with definitions that are up for interpretation and kind of written out in the way the author interprets those words. But the next page after a definition of a word is a "Ritual" page, which every time I got to made absolutely no sense to me, most of the rituals sounded self sabotaging and really aggressive. I just do not think this was for me, and that's okay. All poetry can be subjective and taken differently by different people, so maybe I just wasn't understanding it the way the author intended.

I also want to mention there are absolutely no trigger warnings in this book, and this discusses several triggering and sensitive topics that may upset people. I was taken aback by some of these topics so I don't want anyone else to be surprised by it's contents. So since it doesn't give any trigger warnings, I will: molestation, rape, and self harm are the big ones. The only other one I can think of is self sabotage which I'm not sure is a major trigger warning, but just something to be aware of if you pick up this book. 

Like I said, I wanted to like this, I really did. I loved the representation that a genderqueer author wrote a book of poetry about their experiences and navigating life. The only thing stopping me from giving it one star is I did like the execution of how it was laid out, and the way it was written. With that being said, I give this 2/5 stars. 
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