I picked this up at Powell’s, because I randomly flipped to the title page “I am going to clone myself then kill the clone and eat it,” and call me a fool, but I was intrigued and amused.

But to say I enjoyed this entire collection would be a lie. I was gaslighting myself the entire time reading it, wondering if I’m genuinely having “too woke” of a reaction because yet another man is writing about hurting people—with a vague pattern of those people being women—and disguising it as poetry. I am all for working through your shit creatively, trust. And I am at fault for not looking into this books more. And I know I sound like a jackass when I say this collection is “human” and has “shards of vulnerability” or “has some lines of potential.”

Which, to get to those gem lines, you have to dig through quite some hay to get to them: “Everybody likes me but that’s because I’m a mirror lying face down in an empty field.”

Or, “…I try to remember my multiplication tables to show that I am still a good person.” Or, “Because I am very in love with the things I don’t remember well-enough.”

In any case, this one just wasn’t for me.