A review by shahana_bookquoting
Helium by Rudy Francisco

5.0

"Every time I try to write about love, my hands cramp
just to show me how painful love can be and sometimes,
pencils break just to prove that every now and then, love takes a little more work than planned."
- Helium, Rudi Francisco

This is my favourite poetry book. Helium by Rudi Francisco is a collection of beautiful hard hitting poems. It has poems on love and relationships, on black people's lives and struggles. When I say love poems they're not the typical mushy types. Even though I'm not a fan of love poems but I loved Rudi Francisco's love poems. It's written in a very beautiful and different way that made me smile. There's no usage of big complicated words but simple words are so cleverly used! The play of words is intricate yet easy to understand and the message reaches you clearly and leaves an impact. Some poems were so cleverly written that I had to read them twice to fully understand and take it in. I usually don't go back to reading the books I've already read, but I usually find myself revisiting this book beacuse I love every poem in it so much!
This book has a lot of amazing poems, but my favourite was 'My Honest Poem' it's a relatively long poem but every line in it so beautiful, so relatable, so brutally true! Some favourite lines:

"I’ve never been in the military,
but I have a purple heart:
I got it from beating myself up
over things that I can’t fix.
Some days I forget that my skin
is not a panic room."
(also..)
"I have solar-powered confidence
and a battery-operated smile.
My hobbies include: editing my life story,
hiding behind metaphors,
and trying to convince my shadow
that I’m someone worth following.
I don’t know much,
but I do know this:
Heaven is full of music,
and God listens to my heartbeat
on his iPod. It reminds him
that we still got work to do."

If I could I would just quote the whole book to be honest. Each and every poem is amazing, inspiring and hard hitting. This book needs so much more recognition. I don't understand how is it so underrated! It's completely amazing, much better than other poetry books I've read.
I would say it's a must read for poetry lovers and if you're not a poetry reader just read this to get your mind blown by poetry. It's beautiful.