Reviews

Loner Forensics: Poems by Thea Brown

sura_reads_books's review

4.0

I loved this collection so much. I love it when a poetry collection has a clear idea, premise, or theme, so this was perfect for me. I loved the vertical poems. I loved the writing style. Some poems were dense, and this took a while to read, but it was worth it.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher!

fiendfull's review

3.0

Loner Forensics is a poetry collection that paints a picture of a city, through the voices of those who live there, under the guise of investigative interviews. Most of the poems are titled as "The" somebody, telling different snippets of stories and playing around with form on the page and use of gaps and space. 

 

I found the collection hard to get into at first, with a distinctive style that you need to get into the groove of, and the opening didn't immediately give me a sense of what was going on. After finishing the collection, I returned to the start, and found it much easier to get along with, so this could be a book to take your time with and find the rhythm of, or at least to reread. I think rereading further might also bring out more of the interconnectedness that you can glimpse in the poems, gradually building up more of a sense of the whole. 

 

A number of the poems are written vertically rather than horizontally on the page and I found these very difficult to read digitally on my laptop - I couldn't tell if this was intentional, if these were meant to be harder to read than the others, or not, but it did make me a bit frustrated when I was already finding it hard to 'get' the poems. However, as I read more of the collection, there weren't too many, and I got more into the poems, so it didn't completely put me off. 

 

Probably my favourite poem was 'The Pollster' because I loved the use of the survey format within the interview format and the way in which it seemed both mundane and deep. I enjoyed where the poems played around with forms based on the person being interviewed, and I think that on further reads there's probably a lot more to unravel from this collection, but I'm not sure I was able to get into it enough on my first reading, feeling maybe fittingly a bit lost. There's such a vibe and atmosphere in the book, one that does almost defy understanding, and I appreciate that even though I think I'll need more time with it.