A review by tui_la_dao
The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace

1.0

I think the book's concept is generally nice. I really empathize with what the author has gone through. But also, soon enough I realize that these are not poems, at least for me. This book reads like Rupi Kaur's (how they add line breaks to sentences out of nowhere to make a poem) and it was not a good experience. I think what is nice about poem is that you can write a short, and not all grammatically correct sentence, but the readers read and understand what was conveyed, and here you got all nice and grammatically sentences but line breaks are added so illogically that if you follow them, you would not understand what was being written. If this is written in a different format maybe it could have worked. This collection just make me feel like I could take out the nicest sentences in my journal, break them down in several lines and I would have a poem collection of my own too. I searched it up and it seems like there is a genre called "insta poem" and yeah, not for me. An example poem in this book:

i
let myself
know
that my life
doesn't
have to be over
just bcs
theirs are
…

it drives me insane, these sentences.

What are the poems I know:
No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future:
Yonnondio! Yonnondio!-unlimn'd they disappear;
To-day gives place, and fades,_the cities, farms, factories fade;
A muffled sonourous sound, a wailing word is borne
through the air for a moment
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost
(from Walt Whitman's Yonnondio)

If you follow the line breaks of this one, you get what it is trying to say. I wish I could have cited some Vietnamese poems too, we have a great language for this genre, but it is mostly lost in translation. (less)