Scan barcode
mandi4886's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Alcohol, Blood, Body shaming, Forced institutionalization, Self harm, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Medical content, Mental illness, Pregnancy, Vomit, Eating disorder, Suicidal thoughts, and Abortion
james1star's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Thank you to NetGalley and Button Poetry for accepting me as a reviewer.
TW: this collection deals with many topics but a considerable part involved eating disorders, mental illness, suicidal thoughts, and self harm among others - but they come from a place of personal trauma and I would say worth reading Baird’s experiences.
I don’t know if I would say I necessarily enjoyed this poetry collection due to the nature of the themes discussed which were quite hard to read. Also some are a little too abstract for me to personally get my head around and others are a bit similar. However, I did feel they all had a lot of meaning, coming from the heart and so you feel an emotive response. There are many snippets and whole poems that really stood out to me and certain points I could relate to too. I’d say if people (and I know this to be true from reading some other reviews) can relate to experiences, thoughts and feelings mentioned then they do impact you a lot and this was a great way for Baird to release her trauma of going through these situations in her life. She guides us through this journey of embracing who she is (queerness, love, loss, femininity, etc) and the vulnerability but also power of healing along the way.
The collection is split into three parts; the first dealing with her going through traumatic events in her life and ‘becoming an emergency’, the second (I think the most impactful) where she is pining for the ‘splinters of improvement’ in her life, and the third (my favourite as it was the most pleasant reading experience) where she’s imaging a better future and entering ‘a place we haven’t been to yet’. - the ‘’ are the titles of each section and they are very well executed for what poems are contained in them.
Some of my most impactful parts of poems are below:
‘We obsess over shame (the most
useless emotion I can think of).’
‘instead, we sang only of the joys, the pastel weekends, & the good things that must live in a place we haven't been to yet.’
‘Of all the things this world
has taught her to apologize for,
I am jealous that love has
never been one of them.’
- this one really spoke to me as she is talking about how her friend’s mum explained sexually to her as a child but Baird herself had to deal with coming to terms with her sexuality on her own and other homophobic dynamics within her life.
‘it is one thing
to want help
and another
to have the
language
to ask for it.’
And my personal favourite as it really spoke to this idea of self hatred in a sense, I’m not entirely sure of how one is supposed to interpret it but for me it is this notion of focusing on one’s worse qualities and bad things more than the good and Yhh… very impactful. But then again someone else might see something else in these words which is a great thing about poetry in its relativity (not always but usually):
‘why did I not
allow myself
to clutch the
shooting stars
of my happiness
as tightly as the
dissolving sea
of my griet?
why is there so
little evidence
of all the nights
I felt iridescent?’
Content Warnings
Graphic: Mental illness, Suicidal thoughts, Self harm, and Eating disorder
Moderate: Suicide, Suicide attempt, and Abortion
Minor: Homophobia and Sexual assault
bladelikesbooks's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
3.0
Sweet, Young, & Worried is a poetry collection of the author’s personal life experiences. There are a plethora of poems in this collection that discusses themes of self-forgiveness, acceptance, queerness, internalised Homophobia, mental illness, eating disorders, grief, abortion, and healing.
The pacing/spacing of the writing seemed a bit disorientated and made it difficult to read at times. My favourite lines were: “You do not have to be a catastrophe to prove you are worth paying attention to”. The arrangement of the poems was a bit confusing as the ones talking about self-hate, EDs, Suicide etc we’re mixed with the ones talking about healing.
The more I think about it, this could have been done on purpose as a way to show that healing is not linear, and if it was intentional, I think it’s genius. As someone who has struggled with mental illness and eating disorders, I related a lot to the author’s experiences.
I usually struggle with reading poetry but this was very easy to comprehend and was a quick read. Although it covered many heavy topics, I think this poetry collection would be great for teens as a lot of what the author talked about is exactly what many teens experience everyday.
I didn’t understand the purpose of the birth chart. There was no writings about it or explanations as to why it was there, it was just kinda thrown in at the end for whatever reason I don’t know. And I know nothing about astrology so I have no clue what it means.
Overall, it was a nice, quick read and I would recommend this to teens struggling with EDs and/or mental illness and/or queerness. I feel they could benefit from connecting with this author so they can feel less alone and more confident that they can heal.
Although I appreciate the NetGalley description for providing some trigger warnings, I think it would have been beneficial to include a page at the beginning of the poetry book with a fuller list of trigger/content warnings considering the rawness of the poems and the heavy discussion topics.
Thank you to NetGalley and Button Poetry for allowing me an eARC of this poetry collection and most of all, thank you to the author for sharing your life experiences.
TWs/CWs - Abortion; Alcohol consumption; Animal death; Anorexia; Blood; Bulimia; Cussing; Drug use; EDs; Homophobia; Internalised Homophobia; Medical detail; Murder; Needles; Overdose; Psychiatric ward; Pregnancy; Self harm; Suicide attempt; Suicide ideation; Vomit
Content Warnings
Graphic: Self harm
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts, Abortion, Homophobia, Medical content, and Eating disorder
Minor: Cursing, Drug use, Vomit, Alcohol, Animal death, Blood, Murder, and Pregnancy
More...