A review by kassi_kennedy
Emotionally Raw by Carlos Cabrera

2.0

"I suck" is something I repeat on the daily,

There is a time and place for Emotional Rawness and this robust collection of poetry does not hesitate in what is promised. However, some of the lines read awkwardly illiciting the opposite response than I believe the writer intended. The above quote being the first line of one poem made me laugh because it caught me so off guard.

This book explores the writer's experience of love, depression, racial inequality, and understanding of self. While it is not particularly developed, each poem does hold a large measure of emotional narrative expressing angry, nihilistic thinking which repeats so much through the narrative that each poem starts to run into the others, often not having any distinction from one another.

I did read this book all the way through and the book did deliver on its title's promise, but that's about the best I can say for it. There are moments in this book where the author touches upon a profound truth yet I found myself frustrated that the author quickly passed up opportunities to speak with a commanding voice and, instead, plowed through to the anger and depression and rage. These missed opportunities somehow ended up cheapening the experience in an unintended way. In other words, it lacked the complexity and seriousness that I was looking for in such a work.

I do not know the author personally, but I did find his book during a self-promotion on twitter. I know he is well loved and has a lot of talent to offer. I would love to read something more focused from this author with a balance of mind and heart that examines complex human emotions, cognitive dissonance, and teaches me something I could never learn without reading his work. He shows enormous promise and can surely express himself well. I simply found myself drowned in the torrents of negative emotions and never really was allowed a breath of fresh air or a final destination where these emotions were to take me.

This book works for a lot of people, but it simply didn't work for me. I wanted to write a fair and honest review, though, and I hope that I did not disappoint. I wanted to like this, but for the reasons stated above, I could not like it the way I thought it was meant to be liked. I also must say I'm a total book snob and I've read so much ancient literature that I might simply not be the target audience for this writer.