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pyrrhicspondee's review against another edition
3.0
Some of the poems here, especially "Litany," are just stellar. I have a number of poems dog-eared because they do things I do not generally do in poetry but find really intriguing and helpful. But many of them do more than fall flat, they offend.
Just as I finished the first section, I thought to myself, "Why is this book in sections?" I can so rarely tell with contemporary poetry books why poets add sections--like, I'm sure they see some connection but it feels like more an artifact of their process and anything useful for a reader. Then I read the second section and DEFINITELY saw a theme--and not a pretty one. Generously, I'll say chunks of this book, many of them in the second section, did not age well. Creedon does that thing where she writes beautifully about the poor, the misbegotten, the struggling. To me this type of poem is condescending; it's an author "humanizing" people who society overlooks. And on the surface this seems fine. But, like, people don't need your humanizing, poet; they are already fully human. To seek to humanize those who never asked you to just points to the fact that YOU failed to see them as human in the first place. UGH. UHG. So yeah, after the second section I was a little over this.
Just as I finished the first section, I thought to myself, "Why is this book in sections?" I can so rarely tell with contemporary poetry books why poets add sections--like, I'm sure they see some connection but it feels like more an artifact of their process and anything useful for a reader. Then I read the second section and DEFINITELY saw a theme--and not a pretty one. Generously, I'll say chunks of this book, many of them in the second section, did not age well. Creedon does that thing where she writes beautifully about the poor, the misbegotten, the struggling. To me this type of poem is condescending; it's an author "humanizing" people who society overlooks. And on the surface this seems fine. But, like, people don't need your humanizing, poet; they are already fully human. To seek to humanize those who never asked you to just points to the fact that YOU failed to see them as human in the first place. UGH. UHG. So yeah, after the second section I was a little over this.
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