thevampiremars's reviews
215 reviews

Better than Tongues of Fire; more varied. The poems here are broken off and unresolved, lending them a ghostly and dreamlike quality. It can be a little frustrating sometimes, and I was left wanting more from some of these poems, but I suppose that’s the nature of dreams, isn’t it? I think it works well. It’s hard to pick out favourites because this broken-off format kind of weaves the poems together into a single disjointed work, but I was particularly fond of “Like a feather,” “Sleepwalk,” “Mistletoe,” and “Immram.”

Earthy. Consistent quality but samey. In the end, it started to get on my nerves. Maybe I would have liked the titular poem if I’d encountered it by itself, but its placement at the end of this anthology reduces it to yet another tree metaphor. Beautiful imagery loses its lustre eventually.

Everyone sucks and everyone deserves better.

Not quite a story, not quite a manifesto. But why am I trying to categorise it?

Middle class white man discovers direct action. 

Not a how-to guide by any means, but it does demonstrate possibilities outside the enclosures of capitalism, with emphasis on building community and connections not only with your fellow humans but with the broader ecosystem. Inspiring.

CONTENT WARNINGS: climate change/ecological collapse/extinction, eviction, police brutality 

My favourite poems were “Serenade to Surrender,” “Insomnia,” “Event Horizon,” and “July”

I found many of the other poems to be unfocused and meandering. I also noticed some were structured in a way that makes sense visually but not rhythmically, and couldn’t unsee that afterwards. Some outstayed their welcome (“Self-Diagnosis” was good but would have been more impactful had it been confined to a single page, I think.)

The whole thing felt a bit amateurish, a bit Tumblr... It is raw and tender, but in a slightly clumsy way. To be fair, Winters was in their late teens when this book was published (and some of the poems may have been written a few years prior). I’d like to read their more recent work.

CONTENT WARNINGS: disordered eating, self harm, suicidality

It’s alright. I’ll probably revisit it at some point, but I don’t really have the energy for it right now. I don’t get the sense that there’s some uniting theory or conclusion being set up. It’s just a collection of brief essays connected by theme but not really building upon one another, and for the most part they’re just plot synopses for short stories I haven’t read. The writing is accessible and the concepts explored are interesting (though they’re not Wilk’s concepts, so I’m not sure I can give her too much credit). There’s just not enough substance to keep me hooked. 

“The world is blood-hot and personal”

I picked up this book because I was vaguely familiar with Sylvia Plath through cultural osmosis but had never actually read her work, and I wanted to change that.

I’m not sure what to make of this collection. There were a few poems I liked (“Tulips,” “Berck-Plage,” “Paralytic”) but others seemed... jumbled? I’m not sure if that’s the right word.

There’s a dreamlike quality in Plath’s writing, evoking imagery mostly by naming colours, which is enough to establish the location or the mood but then I’d feel a bit lost. I felt like I never quite got what she was gesturing at; I know she was a writer and I know she was abused and I know she killed herself, but I didn’t know her, so the deeply personal nature of many of these poems made it difficult for me to grasp her meaning.

CONTENT WARNINGS: death, suicide, injury, blood, racism 

In these brief essays, Preciado idly comments on (then-)current events or half-remembers a Wikipedia article he read. I was drawn in by the Uranus motif and the idea of reclaiming/reinventing uranism, but he doesn’t really do anything with the concept beyond mentioning it. His observations are mostly obvious. Sometimes he’ll say something that might be interesting but his point is obscured by buzzwords and neologisms.

I stopped properly reading about a third of the way through, but I did skim the rest. I don’t like giving up on books but honestly? This was a phenomenal waste of time.