Rating: ★★★✯☆

This was powerful, insightful and very relatable.

This book touched on so many topics, race being one of the main ones, and I found it to be so empowering. I think this would speak more to women of colour. Mainly because it focalises a lot on themes like appreciating your culture, loving your skin and your ethnic features, as well as more difficult topics like white guilt. There were certain poems that spoke a lot about Africa and what it means to be an African in a westernised society. As someone who isn't African, I found those poems specifically to be so insightful.

My favourite poem, or the one that spoke to me to the most, was:

i will crawl for white beauty.
eat my arms.
barter my legs (make my thighs into altars of grief).
for
skin that does not drink night.
hair that is not angry.
body that is not soil.
i place curses on my flesh
call them diets.
tell my ancestors
they are ugly.
howl at my nose until it bleeds.
run my heart across my teeth, repeatedly.
i am dying.
to be
beautiful.

Like how STUNNING is that?

Poetry is something that is so personal. It's more than just words, it's thoughts and feelings and ideas that have struck the poet so profoundly that they had to make art out of it. I really appreciate what Nayyirah Waheed has done with this poetry book. I think this would be so empowering to many young women of colour all over the world.

The reason I didn't rate this higher was because there were quite a few poems that seemed unoriginal, if that's the right word? There were certain peoms that were like little statements that I'd already heard a million times before.

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