Scan barcode
nikogatts's review
3.0
A pretty decent collection of poems, about murders and tragedies both real and imagined. Among my favorite poems were "With or Without Milk," "Facebook Killer," and the several Meditations on Murder at the end of the book.
bethifer's review
3.0
Viscous and visceral as only poetry can be. A difficult read, even for someone who loves crime books, fact and fiction alike.
moreadsbooks's review against another edition
2.0
Removing myself briefly from my Skyrim haze to read some poetry. This is a handsome little volume, very trim & compact with a nice red ribbon place marker. I was surprised that I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. Am I getting too delicate as I age? Within the first few pages of this book, I found "Mother" by Kaci Hamilton. At first I thought it was about matricide & I was totally cool with it. Reading on, it's actually the mother that's doing the killing. "That little mouth/the spittle of milk" - I just got kind of sad again re-reading that passge. It turns out that infanticide = not my cup of tea.
This book veers between strange, uncomfortable oddities like "Birthing" (told from the perspective of Susan Smith's made-up carjacker & interspersed with passages from her confession), "Herbert White" (which starts off "When I hit her on the head, it was good/and then I did it to her a couple of times,— " and goes nowhere pleasant from there); "Stackalee" and other poems containng words like baith, ere ye, maun, and bonny that would be perfectly at home on a Nick Cave album; and then druck like Melissa Balmain's "Facebook Psycho" ("old-school killer app", yeah yeah, got it). All this back and forth has made me slightly dizzy and a little creeped out.
This book veers between strange, uncomfortable oddities like "Birthing" (told from the perspective of Susan Smith's made-up carjacker & interspersed with passages from her confession), "Herbert White" (which starts off "When I hit her on the head, it was good/and then I did it to her a couple of times,— " and goes nowhere pleasant from there); "Stackalee" and other poems containng words like baith, ere ye, maun, and bonny that would be perfectly at home on a Nick Cave album; and then druck like Melissa Balmain's "Facebook Psycho" ("old-school killer app", yeah yeah, got it). All this back and forth has made me slightly dizzy and a little creeped out.
pturnbull's review against another edition
3.0
This was an impulse read, discovered when browsing our local public library's poetry section. Each poem tells the story of a murder from many points of view, both murderer as well as victim. I was excited to find an excellent pantoum included, "Blue-Beard's First Wife" by Leon Gellert. I also liked Simon Armitage's "Gooseberry Season," and Mark Doty's "Charlie Howard's Descent." The best poems leave holes in their telling, where something remains unfathomable about what is described.
ninjamuse's review against another edition
4.0
In brief: A collection of poems about murders and murderers.
Thoughts: There are a lot of really good poems in this, but don’t do what I did and read it cover to cover. It gets heavy fast, when you do that. It weighs on a body.
This is a lot like short story collections for me, in that some poems hit harder than others and some just fell flat, but I liked the variety and the diversity of the perspectives and types of poem and most of the poems I didn’t like (or didn’t get) I could still appreciate the technique of. There are condemnations of and meditations on death and murder galore, as well as explorations of the states of minds of killers, which were probably the darkest bits for me. That and the descriptions of the acts.
Particular favourites include “Fall River Historical Museum”, “Naked City”, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981“, “Whitechapel Nights”, “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses”, “Wi’-Gi’E”, “Crime Club”, and pretty much all the murder ballads.
If you have morbid tastes like I do, and you occasionally find yourself in the mood to read about death, true crime, and serial killers, I certainly rec this. It’s a strong collection with something for everyone, as long as their taste runs dark. Definitely not a collection for everyone, though!
Warnings: Death, murder, gore, dead bodies, sex crimes, abuse, slavery, entitled white men, racism. One poem that hints at a coming lynching. Poems from the POVs of killers. Covers Matthew Shepard, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Speck, Susan Smith, the Atlanta, GA child murders of 1981, the Virginia Polytechnic shootings of 2007, and the Athens, GA shooting of 2009. Some poems unfriendly to trans and gay people. (Ask and I can give titles and page numbers.)
8/10
Thoughts: There are a lot of really good poems in this, but don’t do what I did and read it cover to cover. It gets heavy fast, when you do that. It weighs on a body.
This is a lot like short story collections for me, in that some poems hit harder than others and some just fell flat, but I liked the variety and the diversity of the perspectives and types of poem and most of the poems I didn’t like (or didn’t get) I could still appreciate the technique of. There are condemnations of and meditations on death and murder galore, as well as explorations of the states of minds of killers, which were probably the darkest bits for me. That and the descriptions of the acts.
Particular favourites include “Fall River Historical Museum”, “Naked City”, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981“, “Whitechapel Nights”, “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses”, “Wi’-Gi’E”, “Crime Club”, and pretty much all the murder ballads.
If you have morbid tastes like I do, and you occasionally find yourself in the mood to read about death, true crime, and serial killers, I certainly rec this. It’s a strong collection with something for everyone, as long as their taste runs dark. Definitely not a collection for everyone, though!
Warnings: Death, murder, gore, dead bodies, sex crimes, abuse, slavery, entitled white men, racism. One poem that hints at a coming lynching. Poems from the POVs of killers. Covers Matthew Shepard, Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Speck, Susan Smith, the Atlanta, GA child murders of 1981, the Virginia Polytechnic shootings of 2007, and the Athens, GA shooting of 2009. Some poems unfriendly to trans and gay people. (Ask and I can give titles and page numbers.)
8/10
More...