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courttknee 's review for:
the words i wish i said
by Caitlin Kelly
emotional
sad
fast-paced
This is the result of when people read Rupi Kaur once and think they can replicate her work. Essentially, this is what happens when AP literature students are told their poetry is decent.
While not all of the poems are awful, and I did find some quite interesting, they definitely were not worth the price of admission. This book is pure teenage angst that you could easily find on Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter for free. Basically, many of these pages should have stayed in the drafts. One of the lines the author blatantly stole from John Green (slowly, then all at once - mind you, this is one of his most widely known lines.) A lot of this book is just complaining about the life of teenage angst, which might have an appeal for the a small audience of teenagers, but then again I don't understand why they would pay for $13 for the same thing that's mass produced on social media.
There was a clear misunderstanding of what a poem was - many of these pages weren't poems, but thoughts spewed out onto the page. Thoughtless line breaks in the middle of a thought do not constitute a poem. Many of these 'poems' had ideas repeated over and over, why not just combine them into a single cohesive poem? It would've made the book a lot better.
Maybe I'm a few years past the expiration date for the intended audience, but that doesn't necessarily excuse the attempt at a poetry book. I think the author has potential, it's just not ripe enough. This is completely understandable, so many of us wrote subpar poetry in our teenage years; we just had the fortune of it to not be published and criticized online.
While not all of the poems are awful, and I did find some quite interesting, they definitely were not worth the price of admission. This book is pure teenage angst that you could easily find on Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter for free. Basically, many of these pages should have stayed in the drafts. One of the lines the author blatantly stole from John Green (slowly, then all at once - mind you, this is one of his most widely known lines.) A lot of this book is just complaining about the life of teenage angst, which might have an appeal for the a small audience of teenagers, but then again I don't understand why they would pay for $13 for the same thing that's mass produced on social media.
There was a clear misunderstanding of what a poem was - many of these pages weren't poems, but thoughts spewed out onto the page. Thoughtless line breaks in the middle of a thought do not constitute a poem. Many of these 'poems' had ideas repeated over and over, why not just combine them into a single cohesive poem? It would've made the book a lot better.
Maybe I'm a few years past the expiration date for the intended audience, but that doesn't necessarily excuse the attempt at a poetry book. I think the author has potential, it's just not ripe enough. This is completely understandable, so many of us wrote subpar poetry in our teenage years; we just had the fortune of it to not be published and criticized online.