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A review by roach
Liebe in Zeiten der Follower by Max Richard Leßmann
fast-paced
2.0
Heut führen wir ein digitales Leben
Doch Einsamkeit und Angst sind analog
I picked this up spontaneously from a display of poetry books at the library. I was intrigued by the colorful presentation and the title roughly translating to Love in Times of Followers. I was hoping for some nice poems with a modern point-of-view on social media and our lives with it.
It was only when I got it home and read the preface that I learned that this book wasn't really a collection of poetry written for printing, but more of a novelty publication collecting a bunch of social media posts by the author. Max Richard Leßmann is a German musician and has a hobby of posting daily short poems on Instagram. This book is a collection of some of those.
And I really feel like your enjoyment of this book heavily relies on how you stumble over it. If you liked the guy and his music first, then stumbled over his Instagram account and become a fan that way, I'm sure it's cool to see him put his daily writing on physical paper for fans to buy. But if you, like me, stumble over this book with no idea of who the author is and just end up with a colorful book of mostly mediocre wordplay in your hands, that leaves a very different impression.
I think Leßmann's personal challenge of daily writing is a fun exercise for him. But seeing them on your social media feed has a different effect than having them printed on paper. I don't think his poetry is great. Lots of them I found repetitive, mundane or with oversimplified wisdom that didn't impress me and sometimes made me roll my eyes. Certain subjects are overrepresented like falling out of contact with people or loving yourself.
There were only a handful of poems I actually found decent to good, one of which was a fairly lengthy one about the effect of digital media on our lives, part of which I used for my opening quote. But for every decent poem with style and point, there are 10 pages of brief casual statements that don't really say anything of note.
This is not to say that enjoying Leßmann's poetry is a bad thing or that he should stop writing. Far from it. But this just didn't do much for me and I feel like these texts really are more at home in Instagram posts.