abysm0's reviews
423 reviews

Inducing a sweet, lulling ache much like homesickness, this wonderful work of poetry demands to be lived as it’s read. It would be accurate to describe this work as a young woman’s coming of age story told through the medium of poetry. However, I believe it would be more fitting to call it a coming of being story veraciously voiced in prose. It’s something heroic, and certainly cathartic, to read someone so openly transparent and vulnerable with themselves and the trauma they’ve been condemned to bear. With incredible emotional literacy, the poetry illuminates a daring, yet vexed individual who, though rife with ambivalences, chooses to interrogate her absurd existence through ruthless self honesty. From the onset, Jacobs reminds us of our shared experience of the human condition, while simultaneously carrying us along through the depths of her own subjective struggles with topics ranging from philosophical growing pains and womanhood, all the way through to her frustration with societal norms, our cultural obsession with work and her own hunt for meaning in a life she feels ostracized from. This is one for those contrarians plagued with a relentless pull towards apathetic introspection. Jacobs does not offer any solutions here, but instead offers a veiled encouragement for those wondering if there’s anyone else out there willing to confront their own suffering and challenge the ways we’ve been taught to think. After reading her work, Jacob’s suffering will feel as though it mirrors your own, and if there’s any deeper purpose of this work, it’s exactly that: to make one feel understood despite the senselessness of their suffering; to show that while we all suffer, by sharing it with others we may not have to suffer alone. The bleakness sticks with you, but between the lines there’s a sense of resolve and perhaps something akin to a whisper of hope.