ARC received in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed and appreciated this collection. As soon as I realised it was an illustrated collection, I did begin to worry that it would be yet another Milk and Honey ripoff, but I'm glad that I was wrong. It was much, much more than that.

For me, possibly because I'm a Classicist, the poems about Aphrodite were by far the strongest. I would happily read a whole book of poetry from her point of view written by this author. Her voice was so incisive and brutal that whenever the 'poet' took over, I was almost disappointed. That's not to say that those poems were bad, but they seemed much less original; I've read Mateer's work before, and a lot of them could honestly have been copied and pasted from other collections. There's only so many ways to rewrite the same poem about self care and believing in yourself, I think.

For that reason, I much preferred the beginning of this collection. Although Mateer herself states that she's tired of writing poems about her trauma ('fuck another poem [...]') and wants to write about healing instead, the truth is that the poetry about healing was almost trite and much less original than the poetry about Medusa's violation, or Aphrodite's misrepresentation. That's by no means to say that poets should only write about darkness, but it almost felt like Mateer's heart wasn't in the latter half. As though she felt she should be writing a certain kind of collection which had a cohesive narrative from trauma to recovery. I may well be wrong about that, but it didn't feel as authentic to me.

That said, I did love how there was an over-arching theme in this collection. Leaving it on a positive note was a clever move, and it felt hopeful rather than dark and unending. The actual writing is beautiful; I highlight lines that I love when I'm reading, and I must've highlighted a good quarter of the book. Trista Mateer is clearly a huge talent, and I eagerly await whatever else she publishes.