i suppose someday
i will find the courage
to not fear
my own humanness.

what i was born from.
what i will inevitably make.
what will hopefully
turn out beautiful.

Almost Home is a tough poetry collection to rate. First of all, I personally am a big fan of this poetry style: the capitalization-free, minimal-punctuation storytelling is easy for me to relate to, and the stream-of-consciousness narrative works really well with my brain in particular.

i have always been soft
when i should've been hard
and hard when i should've been soft.

I say all of this to tell you: I'm not sure why I didn't love this collection. Honestly, it's the sort of thing I "should" have really adored, and I did LOVE many poems in the collection (with these that I've quoted being my favorites). It's just that so many of the poems in between fell flat for me due to repetition, or more often than not, simply being too long. One of the reasons this style works so well is because the poems are typically done in short bursts, but many of these are 3 solid pages long, and I feel like the "punch" of the story she's telling begins to feel watered down once you've spent that many paragraphs re-wording the same emotion.

i am happy and lucky
to be here.
it makes my heart heavy
to know that i must
remind myself of that
so often.

That said, if you like this style, too, it's definitely worth giving a shot, because there are some real gems in the collection. The last section of the book is about self-love and appreciating the world around us, and after 150+ pages of discussing trauma, mental illnesses, and (I mean this kindly, not to throw shade) self-pity parties, it was a huge breath of fresh air to hit the poems like this last one I've quoted. Those alone were enough to make me feel like, despite this not firing on all cylinders for me, Almost Home is still the sort of collection I could happily recommend to other readers.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!