A review by laura_sackton
Advice from the Lights: Poems by Stephanie Burt

I enjoyed this collection but I didn't love it. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry that doesn’t feel image-ful or playful or like it is obsessed with language recently. This book felt a little bit like that, just too many lines that didn’t feel like they messed with and celebrated language the way I want poems to.

There is a series of Stephanie poems, where the poet remembers and reimagines their childhood as girlhood, that I loved. They are funny and sad. They are about both confusion and surety, wondering about what it might have been like if they’d been a girl or people had treated them like a girl or given them more space. 

There are also a bunch of poems like "My 1986", which are these poems about specific years, and what happened during them, what the BUrt remembers, which I liked for their specificity. There is this really lovely play and nostalgia fuckery in the way these poems look at the past. They're about memory and how weird it is and childhood and how weird it can be.