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theliteraryteapot 's review for:
Portrait of My Body As a Crime I'm Still Committing
by Topaz Winters
fast-paced
I have a huge amount of respect for anyone who will write such vulnerability and I know quite well how cathartic, how healing it can be. That being said, my criticisms will not be too different than the ones I usually have for most of these 2010s English-language poetry collections. Yes, the themes can be poignant, important, healing. However, this writing style in perhaps a tumblr (at least a tiny bit different from instagram) fashion with long poems that feel much more like poetic prose with random line breaks is not of my taste. I only enjoyed two poems: “Infernal / Inferno” and “50 Words for Snow” (except for the last four stanzas).
My issues for this specific work are that this type of poetic writing has little to no emotional impact on me as the reader because it is as if the poem itself gets a bit lost in what it's trying to convey, because it nearly shows a lack of editing (although I think you don't edit poetry as you would a novel). It seems to me a bit overwritten, using lots of unfocused imagery and overusing the “&” (this was simply annoying and made me feel back in 2015 tumblr era).
Overall, all I can think of with these types of poetry collections are two things: 1. the poet has an American MFA in creative writing and has an American university poetic style (which, I was thinking how I could not quite tell apart one 2010s poetry book from another). 2. This is poetry for social media and for cathartic purposes making it a sort of poetic journal entries collection. And none of those two things are bad. Keep writing! Keep reading poetry! Keep engaging with art! I will always be thankful to these poets and to Rupi Kaur in particular for bringing in SO many people to the world of poetry. They are an absolute necessity. These collections are simply not my style. They also remind me of how the rest of the world, outside of the anglophone countries I mean, has so much to offer with world poetry. I may have already mentioned it in a review, but my view of poetic writing has drastically evolved after reading both Persian poetry and Jo Clement’s Outlandish.
My issues for this specific work are that this type of poetic writing has little to no emotional impact on me as the reader because it is as if the poem itself gets a bit lost in what it's trying to convey, because it nearly shows a lack of editing (although I think you don't edit poetry as you would a novel). It seems to me a bit overwritten, using lots of unfocused imagery and overusing the “&” (this was simply annoying and made me feel back in 2015 tumblr era).
Overall, all I can think of with these types of poetry collections are two things: 1. the poet has an American MFA in creative writing and has an American university poetic style (which, I was thinking how I could not quite tell apart one 2010s poetry book from another). 2. This is poetry for social media and for cathartic purposes making it a sort of poetic journal entries collection. And none of those two things are bad. Keep writing! Keep reading poetry! Keep engaging with art! I will always be thankful to these poets and to Rupi Kaur in particular for bringing in SO many people to the world of poetry. They are an absolute necessity. These collections are simply not my style. They also remind me of how the rest of the world, outside of the anglophone countries I mean, has so much to offer with world poetry. I may have already mentioned it in a review, but my view of poetic writing has drastically evolved after reading both Persian poetry and Jo Clement’s Outlandish.