Reviews and Comments

Lovelace (she/they) writes lines of short jabs and uses tons of whitespace, sometimes even making shape poems, like a keyhole where the act of reciting the poem is like inserting the key. They write heavily emotional poems about love, loneliness, abuse, fat-shaming, the joy of writing, and death (a mother and a sister!)

Some of the reviews on Goodreads vilify the poet, claiming they do not write poetry, only chopping up prose into lines of one or two words and a carriage-return. They include personal examples, humorous efforts, and, yes, I get the joke, but... WELL, I loved this book and the critics are completely missing the point, concentrating more on form than the unique way Lovelace's poetry conveys meaning,.

And there is humor too, much of it dark, like a house-shaped poem “there/was never/enough alcohol/to keep my mother warm/in a house/as cold as/t h i s.//- but you kept trying didn’t you.” See how much better it is shaped like a house instead of just written? What won me over though is the language like “there came/a time/when/poetry/showed me/how to/bleed/without/the demand/of blood.” There is just nothing to add. Another? “he/opened me up/like a book/& poured the/poetry/back into/me.” This is really a narrow sampling though. Lovelace’s work is disarming (one advantage of their short-line style: it’s easy like eating little chocolates), but they use the device to penetrate with heavy thoughts. It is very effective way to throw a gut punch.

Many of the poems have accompanying artwork, spare depictions of scenes in lines and curves, but never complex. Kaur uses white space simply, and decreases the length of the line sometimes to be more percussive, while letting some lines wax further, usually with more multisyllabic words. Some pages have a single line like “you break women in like shoes” One poem, “questions,” uses anaphora quite a lot, and the title poem uses italicized dialogue, and, because most of the poem is a conversation (“together we are an endless conversation,” she adds later), we realize the deliberate engagement in love that is often absent from her other pieces. My favorite in this vein is “- our souls are mirrors,” which I will not quote here but hope you go seek it.

The poems are about love (“a double-edged knife”), addiction, immigration, betrayal, loss, self-love, therapy, motherhood, insecurity, and (in a dramatic piece entitled “home”) sexual assault. Despite the collection’s title, there are more dark clouds than sunshine in these pages. I like several of the small pieces like “the irony of loneliness/is we all feel it/at the same time//- together.” I liked this one too: “this place makes me/the kind of exhausted that has/nothing to do with sleep/and everything to do with/the people around me.” It’s clear, pointed writing, and a colorful expression of a relateable sentiment, and Kaur does this with deliberately unsophisticated language and bland line terminals like “has” and “with,” giving me a feeling of surrender and suppression of will. Indeed, Kaur does not often use concrete language, and the economy makes it more impactful when she does employ vivid imagery: “i peeled my skin off just to feel awake/wore it inside out/sprinkled it with salt to punish myself.” That is going to leave a mark.

In Naomi Novik's strange world, potentially gifted wizard children are hunted as sources of mana, which they earn through different activities, as varied as crochet, yoga, push-ups, and (in Orion Lake's case) hunting mals, the name given to the evil creatures that roam about trying to consume mages and their children. The protagonist, El (short for Galadriel, her hippie-mom's choice), attends Scholomance, the teacherless, self-aware school created by the wizarding community to help its children survive to adulthood. Scholomance has been for many generations overrun by mals and surviving graduation means literally living through what amounts to a bull run of horrors.

In A Deadly Education, we follow El's progress through her junior year. The story is told in 1st-person with minimal psychic distance, though it is also clear from numerous presumptions that El's perspective is not the only side of the story, even if she doesn't see it that way herself. A lot of other reviewers find her annoying. Yeah, maybe, but she is annoying like young people who are egotistical (most young people) can be, coupled with the practical need to survive. I actually liked El by the time the real story unfolded.

One part of the magical economy that I liked was how language was used to limit the available spells. Mana is pretty much widespread, even if dangerous to accumulate (because it attracts mals), but a wizard needs access to spells, which means they have to study numerous languages. This is one advantage of incorporating a wide variety of nationalities and ethnicities in the story. I also liked the social statement Novik makes about the haves and have-nots of her world.

Pretty amazing story. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. :-)