Valerie Loveland

My favorite kind of poetry is surreal, and this collection was very surreal. I liked most of the poems, although I didn't like the roughness that happened towards animals in some of the poems. I admit I am sensitive.

Most of the book was entertaining and its images often surprised me. There were some poems with line breaks, others that were prose poems, some had unusual indents and lines scattered throughout the page. Some of the poems have the words blend together without breaks between words.

The titles were interesting but often didn't feel like they matched up with the poems. I am definitely going to check out more books of poems by Hyesoon. I know she has other books that were translated into English. The book was translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi.

My four favorite poems in the book:

A Sublime Kitchen
Regarding Love 2
Words (a multi poem series)
Soeul, My Oasis

Fantastic book. I couldn't stop reading. I think this book has potential to open a lot of people's eyes about race in the U.S. I wish it was getting more attention.

I heard a lot of good things about this book and did enjoy the poems. There were a lot of pleasing phrases and ideas in the poems. There were times I felt like the lines could have been jumbled together with other poems, they weren't specific enough for each poem, but I don't think that took away enjoyment of what I was reading.

I thought her poem titles were really fun and I liked their complexity, although sometimes I didn't think they were always strongly connected to the poems.

Almost all the poems were one stanza long. There were a few that were broken into many stanzas, but I preferred the one stanza poems, they suited the poetry style best.

My four favorites in the book:

How to Lose Lost Objects

How to Carefully Consider Interstellar Space Travel

How to Find Water in the Orange

How to Hold a Tiny Eye

I really liked this collection. It was sold out on Radioactive Moat's website, but I was glad that they have it free to download.

I loved the voice in the poems, it was interesting and inventive. My only complaint is I wanted the book to be longer. There were a few poems that it was hard for me to tell where one poem started and ended, but I saw that as part of the fun of the book.

Here is the link to read the whole book.

My four favorites from the book:

i pull this suicide out of my ass
Your premature ejaculation is my rejection letter
To:
Imma single ready to commingle

I haven't really read a book like this before but I am working on getting comfortable with math again. I liked certain parts of this book a lot. My favorite was his description of size comparisons of parts of our cells, our place in the universe. I had no concept of any of that. Some of it was more clear than other parts of it.

This is the book that I got the most comments on while riding on the subway. I think this is a good place for my math adventure to start.

I have't been reading enough regularly and I am so glad I picked this book as my first poetry book to read. I read this very quickly because the poems were so enjoyable. I loved the creepy surreal images, and the tone.

The first section of the book had poems about sea slugs. Each poem had a description on the bottom that came from a sea slug forum online. I liked the poems best when I read the description and then the reaction poem. I had more insight that way.

My favorite section was the middle, which had the dreamiest surreal poems. I kept being surprised and pleased by the images.

My favorites in the book:

Sleeping with Mr. Z

Sunday Night Insomnia

Penis Fencing

Life Cycle

I always like Mary Ruefle's poetry. She is consistently good, and I've enjoyed every book of poetry of hers that I've read. I didn't like this one as much as the others that I read, but it was still good.

The linebreaks felt really choppy this time. I looked at some of the poems I liked in her other books, and they aren't a lot shorter than these but the lines seem broken in better places. Ruefle has poems that lines end with words like “the” or “of.” I also think the poems overall were a little less inventive. Not terrible, but her other poems were fantastic so there is a really high established standard.

I liked her shorter poems better than her longer poems in this book.

My favorite poems in this book:

Argot
Jumping Ahead
Broken Spoke
Goodnight Irene (This is the last poem example and is two pages long)

Super fun book. I am glad to hear this is the first in a long series and look forward to reading the rest of them.

I picked this up at the library on a whim and liked this poet's style. It seemed like they used simple language and elevated it by the way the words combined and by their concepts. I always enjoy Ugly Duckling Presse's books.

Pitch black with tiaras and ribbons, then tortured preteens. Hard to read, I want to save them.

Whenever I read a Cory Doctorow book, I start out skeptical about the tone and subject of the book and then I am won over and really enjoy the book. I don't really know a lot about Disney, but I went when I was 11 and had a nice time. The setting is perfect and I loved the futuristic mixed in with the familiar, which I would say is Doctorow's specialty. I wish I went with my family when they went to Disney World–they got back right before I started reading this book.

Really fun, weird, unique book. It's refreshing to read something that is not like anything else, and I love how creative it is. It was great for reading aloud and also taking photos of certain pages out of context and sending them to people.

I can't believe that this is her second book. The poems are great. Out of all the audio recordings of Sexton reading, most of them have been from this book.

I was surprised at how much I loved this book. I understand why it is so popular. The subject is not something that most people would think was enjoyable, but the examples and tone were both really entertaining. I am going to check out their other books.

Gorgeous writing. I especially love the tone of this. I was pretty surprised when I read my favorite sections of this to my husband and he didn't like it. I thought for sure the whole world would love this as much as I do. I can't tell if this is because I was already won over by the time I got to these sections, or if the book isn't easily sliced into pieces.

I really enjoyed reading this book because it was half Plath history and half 1950's fashion show. I loved hearing about all the specific outfits and fashions. I was surprised how light it was since everyone considers the Summer at Mademoiselle led to Plath's suicide attempt. I still would have liked the book if it wasn't specifically about Plath–most of it was a lot of fun.

I love the format, I love the weird story. I only read this on the subway so it took me awhile.

This book was full of wordplay. I felt like it would have been really great at a reading. The words sound good. I don't like the way a lot of it looks on the page. There were poems that were written in all caps and in one big chunk of text, others without punctuation. Many were written in very small lines, so the poem spread out thinly across many pages. Another reviewer complained that these poems were clever word play and odd syntactical experimentation. Those things are what I liked about the book, but I can see how this could be annoying. My main issue is the words seem to want to flow faster than the time it takes to navigate a very thin line or the extremely thick text block

I found out about this writer because a friend of mine was at AWP and went to a panel that he participated in and she said he was so smart she wanted to pick up his book. I read his poems that were in Poetry Magazine and I liked them. These poems seemed somehow less finished than the ones I saw in Poetry. I almost feel like he gave his poems a makeover to make them more palatable for people. The poems may not be as edgy as these, but the Poetry poems still have an edge to them.

My favorites in the book:

dream-construct of a dream constructed

Relay Alpha, Bravo, Charlie<>

arms akimbo, scolding plekhanovian

I am grateful that I had to read this for a civil rights history class. It was really hard to read, but important.

From the book: “The very frequent inquiry made after my lectures by interested friends is ‘What can I do to help the cause?' The answer always is: ‘Tell the world the facts.'”

I thought this was great, and I loved reading about the way Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe encouraged and helped each other be artists.

Kris got me this book for Christmas last year, and it was such a great present. I love books about books, and this one was great. The only thing I can complain about is the romance in the book. Every description of Daniel falling for a girl was really cheesy. Luckily, there wasn't that much of that. The rest of the book is so good, I don't hold the bad romance writing against Zafon.

I was really excited to read this translation after I heard some of the poems read on the Poetry Magazine podcast. They were gorgeous. Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky translated the book together. They didn't include the rhymes which were a big part of Tsvetaeva's work. I'm glad they didn't–when translations try to keep the rhymes, it seems really awkward and distracting to me.

Her poems seem fairly simple if you just look at the words. Nothing really fancy happens. The poems are passionate, and I got the idea that Tsvetaeva never felt anything half-way

The book was great. My one complaint is the book is VERY short. It only had about 30 pages of poetry and was 50 pages all together. At the end, Kaminsky wrote some biographical information about Tsvetaeva, and I was glad to hear more information about her life. I hope the book does well and the two decide to translate more of her poems. I feel like I just got a tiny taste of her poems and I am greedy for more!

There is a cd in the book of the poems being read in their original Russian (and English too, I think?), but I haven't had a chance to listen yet. I will update my review then.

Valentine and Kaminsky had an event in Boston and I wasn't able to make it. I really regret not being able to go.

Favorites from the book:

The Desk

Poems for Moscow

An Attempt at Jealousy

Where does such tenderness come from

Here is a link to all of her poems on Poetry's website (most translated by Valentine and Kaminsky)

Awwww.

I think I would have liked this book a lot more if I hadn't read all the other Jeopardy books that people wrote because they all talk about this book. I feel like I already read this as I was reading it.

Really fun book of ghazals! There were backwards ghazals, fill in the blank ghazals, ghazals that are quizzes, a hangman version, a vertical version. Not every poem was the best ever, but that's okay because Sederat makes up that by making all of them fun and creative. You can tell he was having a great time while writing these.