Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Sweet, Young, & Worried

Reviews tagging 'Homophobia'

Sweet, Young, & Worried by Blythe Baird

9 reviews

culebraarcoiris's review

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dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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kalira's review against another edition

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emotional reflective tense medium-paced

3.75

While the issues and hurts focused upon are not mine, Blythe Baird represents them evocatively and opens a window into the depths even from far off.

The one that hits hardest for me remains, however, the very first one - In The Shape Of A Poem

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c100's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

4.0

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cer15712's review

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dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

0.25

Just boring trauma poems. Same writing style as Rupi Kaur. Cliché metaphors and phrases pulled from tumblr posts.

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briannad4's review

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emotional reflective

5.0

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diana_raquel's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.5

[Disclaimer: I won a digital copy of this book in a giveaway. However, the following review is my own opinion of this book.]

“It is one thing to want help and another to have the language to ask for it.”

Sweet, Young, & Worried by Blythe Baird is a collection of poems about suffering and healing, love, queerness, loss, mental health, and feminism. I didn't know what to expect from this book. I don't read a lot of poetry (I try to read more, I swear), but the title of this book caught my attention and I decided to enter the giveaway. Imagine my surprise when I receive an email telling me that I had won a digital copy!

It was a pleasant surprise in the sense that I love it! The poems are raw and emotional. Some of them touch on very serious and dark themes that can be triggering to some people. Others just "hit the feels" and makes a person feel understood. As someone who struggles with mental health and anxiety, some of these poems were very relatable. I felt seen and understood.

I didn't know what to expect from this book, but I love it and I have plans to read other books by the author. Really recommend it!!

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angelsowllibrarian's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad fast-paced

2.5

Thank you Netgalley for approving me to read for a review! I also won an audibook of this on StoryGraph shortly after being approved and listened while I read along. I enjoyed this more having the author reading it as intended than I would have reading it by itself, especially with the awkward digital formatting.
I was hoping that this poetry book with lead more with queerness and healing than ED and SH like the author's previous books. But, as the author wrote in the book, "I still don't know how to write about the things that didn't hurt." I understand that both ED and SH are things that linger, but I have finally gotten myself out of that mental space so reading this felt a bit like backsliding for me. Or like trying to be nostalgic about being sick again, if that makes sense.
I enjoyed the longer poems because they felt more substantial to me than the shorter ones did. I understand why there are more short, bite sized poems than there are long, deeper poems. Poetry like this is very personal and making yourself open and vulnerable for strangers to have pieces of. I just wish there was maybe a few more longer poems to think more deeply about. I enjoy the author's voice so I'm looking forward to the day when they're able to write about more than things that hurt.

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james1star's review

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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?’

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bladelikesbooks's review

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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

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