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A review by foggy_rosamund
If I'm Scared We Can't Win by Sophie Collins, Emily Berry, Anne Carson
3.0
Before I read this collection, I only knew the work of Anne Carson. Carson is a favourite of mine, though I feel that her poetry can be uneven. Some of these poems seem too gimmicky, particularly the extracts from "Red Doc" which I found very hard to follow. But I think this gives an introduction to her work, though some of the long narratives, like The Beauty of the Husband, or Autobiography of Red, don't work so well in extract. I really enjoyed her poem "By Chance the Cycladic People": complex, cryptic and beautiful.
I was very interested to read the work of both Emily Berry and Sophie Collins. In this collection, I found their work surprisingly similar: frequently using line-breaks instead of punctuation, and using a lot of snippets from dialogue, they give a sense of being found poems. Though I struggled to warm to them, there were some gems, and I was pleased to have been introduced to them. I'm glad Penguin is publishing this series.
I was very interested to read the work of both Emily Berry and Sophie Collins. In this collection, I found their work surprisingly similar: frequently using line-breaks instead of punctuation, and using a lot of snippets from dialogue, they give a sense of being found poems. Though I struggled to warm to them, there were some gems, and I was pleased to have been introduced to them. I'm glad Penguin is publishing this series.