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A review by cstefko
Tenderness by Derrick Austin
4.0
4 stars
Not a new favorite, but I liked the overall vibe of Austin's poems. I was tempted to read this collection by the poem that's actually the closing poem, "Lilting," (having read it somewhere else... maybe just Twitter? Can't recall), and it's still the favorite for me after having read the rest of the collection. It has a seriously perfect line in it: "For once, I didn't hear you / From the room called / Memory." All the individual lines in this poem start with a capital letter anyway, but I chose to hear that as Memory with a capital M. Just feels right that way. I also loved the multi-part poem "Son Jarocho," which describes a trip with friends to Mexico in all its intricacies and contradictions. Another standout was "Sadness Isn't the Only Muse" which concludes, "I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through." Really I just love poems where a sense of the speaker's interior life comes through strongly. There's a self-deprecating self-consciousness in Austin's poems that I also connected with. Definitely give this collection a read!
This was my first poetry read for NaPoWriMo 2022, seven days into the month. I am slipping!
Not a new favorite, but I liked the overall vibe of Austin's poems. I was tempted to read this collection by the poem that's actually the closing poem, "Lilting," (having read it somewhere else... maybe just Twitter? Can't recall), and it's still the favorite for me after having read the rest of the collection. It has a seriously perfect line in it: "For once, I didn't hear you / From the room called / Memory." All the individual lines in this poem start with a capital letter anyway, but I chose to hear that as Memory with a capital M. Just feels right that way. I also loved the multi-part poem "Son Jarocho," which describes a trip with friends to Mexico in all its intricacies and contradictions. Another standout was "Sadness Isn't the Only Muse" which concludes, "I still love books where nothing happens, / good or bad. The page is one landscape I move through." Really I just love poems where a sense of the speaker's interior life comes through strongly. There's a self-deprecating self-consciousness in Austin's poems that I also connected with. Definitely give this collection a read!
This was my first poetry read for NaPoWriMo 2022, seven days into the month. I am slipping!