2 stars
This book sat on my To-Be-Read shelf for quite a while, because I felt I needed to be in the right mindset to read it and have enough time to enjoy it and really digest it. I finally brought it with me on a road trip to read and honestly, I was just underwhelmed after hearing so much praise about it.
The majority of the poetry is short, vague, uninspiring, and lacks any rhythm or form. It was quite a disappointment. Most of the poems feel like snippets of poems rather than full poems themselves. Of the entire collection, I liked maybe one or two. Most of the poems read like someone had a great idea and wrote it down to develop later, yet these ones never got developed further than that initial idea.
The book is broken down into four sections: the hurting, the loving, the breaking, and the healing. The first section is the most difficult to read as it deals with hard issues like rape, abuse, and possibly incest. These are obviously hard things to deal with and write about and I commend Kaur for sharing such painful stories and memories, but as far as poetry goes, the majority lacked a message or thought-provoking idea. Many of them just appeared to share the event without much reflection or analysis. While this can be cathartic, it doesn’t make for great poetry and they read like undeveloped poems that are meaningful to the person writing them, but not necessarily to strangers reading a collection of them.
Overall, this just wasn’t the type of poetry I like. I had heard good things about this book, but the style just didn’t resonate with me. Some of the doodles were interesting and I liked one or two of the actual poems, but on the whole, the collection was kind of a letdown.