A review by robinsversion
Salt by Nayyirah Waheed

2.0

While this is more coherent and comprehensible than “stream black books” (well, for the most part) and contains some powerful and beautiful poems about race and racism, the author still, well, to put it nicely, has a way to go in terms of properly expressing her ideas and viewpoints on the world. In one poem she insists her “english” is “broken on purpose” to make the reader have to put in the work to read and properly understand her, but it honestly just reads as more of an excuse for her flimsy and failing attempts at creating a “concept” piece. She needs to focus way less on creating new (or in her words “pre”) forms of “art” and much more on being able to handle even the basics. Even at the best of times, her poems just felt massively incomplete.