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snowmaiden's review against another edition
5.0
I bought this book on a whim, and when it arrived in the mail, I glanced through it and thought that it didn't look like my kind of poetry. However, I decided to bring it along on my recent vacation anyway. One afternoon when I had nothing particular to do, I decided to dip into it, and I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting! It's hard to describe the poetic technique that Colen used in creating this book. The elephant in the room, the thing that only gets mentioned around the edges in passing, is a romantic relationship, which begins to fray soon after the narrator moves with her lover to a new house. But we hardly hear anything about this relationship directly. Instead, several different threads of facts are interwoven together. For instance, there's one thread about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, and there's another about the life cycle of the raccoon. Somehow, Colen has taken all these facts and twisted them together into a narrative of this failing romance. It seems so easy that anybody could have done it, but obviously that's not really true. I'm in awe of this book and wish passionately that I had written it, even if it isn't my kind of poetry at all.
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