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A review by livtheninth
Under Her Skin by Lindy Ryan, Linda D. Addison, Toni Miller
2.0
I think my expectations were a bit too high going into this poetry collection. Knowing what it intended to do, I expected to be blown away, horrified, perhaps disgusted, and that this content would provoke a lot of introspective thought on my part as a female reader. I anticipated something like the emotions I went through reading the short stories in "Her Body and Other Parties" by Carmen Maria Machado—visceral dread, trauma release and unease, heightened by the fact that the horror in those stories comes in large part from how they relate to existing in a female body. As it turned out, I counted only a handful of poems in "Under Her Skin" as having any such impact on me whatsoever, which is, in the end, a disappointment to me. Again: my expectations were perhaps a bit too high.
However, poetry and how it affects you is very subjective, and it is important to keep your biases in mind reading a collection such as this. Especially when it comes to poetry which springs from diverse voices where the poets' lived experiences may differ wildly from your own. For example, many of the poems had themes of pregnancy, womanhood as it pertains to fertility, and motherhood—themes which I just do not relate to at all. They are an important part of many people's lives, though, and I recognize that those works just weren't written for me—and that is okay! They might be perfect and feel very resonant to another reader.
Beyond that, though, other poems I regretfully had issues with because they were just too vague for me. I love symbolism, but it needs to be rooted in some sort of clear intent, and here, at times I struggled to understand what the writer was trying to convey, as though the direction was somehow "off".
Others felt too shallow to me; I wanted the poems to cut deeper into the themes they centered around, because there is so much potential in the concept of cis and trans women and non-binary folks expressing their own personal horror, but I felt like a great number of the poems didn't deliver on their promise. At times, they felt repetitive.
Some of the ones I enjoyed the least read to me like the writer had formulated their phrases from a list of words that they thought sounded cool or beautiful, and those poems ended up saying nothing but "look at these pretty words" to me, which left me feeling empty.
Now a superficial note: the cover art is absolutely gorgeous, but the small drawings inside felt a bit... rushed? They could have benefited from more work. And there could have been more drawings, for that matter—they seemed kind of unevenly scattered throughout the collection, and that made them feel a bit like they were just thrown in there at the last second. This is just my opinion, but I felt like the drawings would have worked better and felt more organic to the content if they had had a more purposeful placement; perhaps if the poems came in some kind of thematic order, and the drawings separated the different themes like subtle chapter markers. I don't know. Just... as they were, I might as well have done without them.
In essence, I think mileage will probably vary with this collection. It might well be a five star read to you, and that will depend on what experiences, biases and preferences in writing that you bring to your reading experience. I would say to anyone curious, give it a chance—you might love it. For me, though, while I am sad to give it two stars as I truly respect the intention of what it was going for, in the end it just didn't give me what I wanted from it.
However, poetry and how it affects you is very subjective, and it is important to keep your biases in mind reading a collection such as this. Especially when it comes to poetry which springs from diverse voices where the poets' lived experiences may differ wildly from your own. For example, many of the poems had themes of pregnancy, womanhood as it pertains to fertility, and motherhood—themes which I just do not relate to at all. They are an important part of many people's lives, though, and I recognize that those works just weren't written for me—and that is okay! They might be perfect and feel very resonant to another reader.
Beyond that, though, other poems I regretfully had issues with because they were just too vague for me. I love symbolism, but it needs to be rooted in some sort of clear intent, and here, at times I struggled to understand what the writer was trying to convey, as though the direction was somehow "off".
Others felt too shallow to me; I wanted the poems to cut deeper into the themes they centered around, because there is so much potential in the concept of cis and trans women and non-binary folks expressing their own personal horror, but I felt like a great number of the poems didn't deliver on their promise. At times, they felt repetitive.
Some of the ones I enjoyed the least read to me like the writer had formulated their phrases from a list of words that they thought sounded cool or beautiful, and those poems ended up saying nothing but "look at these pretty words" to me, which left me feeling empty.
Now a superficial note: the cover art is absolutely gorgeous, but the small drawings inside felt a bit... rushed? They could have benefited from more work. And there could have been more drawings, for that matter—they seemed kind of unevenly scattered throughout the collection, and that made them feel a bit like they were just thrown in there at the last second. This is just my opinion, but I felt like the drawings would have worked better and felt more organic to the content if they had had a more purposeful placement; perhaps if the poems came in some kind of thematic order, and the drawings separated the different themes like subtle chapter markers. I don't know. Just... as they were, I might as well have done without them.
In essence, I think mileage will probably vary with this collection. It might well be a five star read to you, and that will depend on what experiences, biases and preferences in writing that you bring to your reading experience. I would say to anyone curious, give it a chance—you might love it. For me, though, while I am sad to give it two stars as I truly respect the intention of what it was going for, in the end it just didn't give me what I wanted from it.