A review by james1star
Sweet, Young, & Worried by Blythe Baird

challenging emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Button Poetry for accepting me as a reviewer. 

TW: this collection deals with many topics but a considerable part involved eating disorders, mental illness, suicidal thoughts, and self harm among others - but they come from a place of personal trauma and I would say worth reading Baird’s experiences. 

I don’t know if I would say I necessarily enjoyed this poetry collection due to the nature of the themes discussed which were quite hard to read. Also some are a little too abstract for me to personally get my head around and others are a bit similar. However, I did feel they all had a lot of meaning, coming from the heart and so you feel an emotive response. There are many snippets and whole poems that really stood out to me and certain points I could relate to too. I’d say if people (and I know this to be true from reading some other reviews) can relate to experiences, thoughts and feelings mentioned then they do impact you a lot and this was a great way for Baird to release her trauma of going through these situations in her life. She guides us through this journey of embracing who she is (queerness, love, loss, femininity, etc) and the vulnerability but also power of healing along the way. 

The collection is split into three parts; the first dealing with her going through traumatic events in her life and ‘becoming an emergency’, the second (I think the most impactful) where she is pining for the ‘splinters of improvement’ in her life, and the third (my favourite as it was the most pleasant reading experience) where she’s imaging a better future and entering ‘a place we haven’t been to yet’. - the ‘’ are the titles of each section and they are very well executed for what poems are contained in them. 

Some of my most impactful parts of poems are below: 
‘We obsess over shame (the most
useless emotion I can think of).’

‘instead, we sang only of the joys, the pastel weekends, & the good things that must live in a place we haven't been to yet.’

‘Of all the things this world
has taught her to apologize for,
I am jealous that love has
never been one of them.’ 
- this one really spoke to me as she is talking about how her friend’s mum explained sexually to her as a child but Baird herself had to deal with coming to terms with her sexuality on her own and other homophobic dynamics within her life. 

‘it is one thing
to want help
and another
to have the
language
to ask for it.’

And my personal favourite as it really spoke to this idea of self hatred in a sense, I’m not entirely sure of how one is supposed to interpret it but for me it is this notion of focusing on one’s worse qualities and bad things more than the good and Yhh… very impactful. But then again someone else might see something else in these words which is a great thing about poetry in its relativity (not always but usually): 
‘why did I not
allow myself

to clutch the
shooting stars

of my happiness

as tightly as the
dissolving sea

of my griet?

why is there so
little evidence

of all the nights
I felt iridescent?’
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