Perhaps this book needs to be read on paper or on a Kindle with the appropriate font. I read a pdf version, and the formatting was borderline unreadable; there were several pages on the pdf version that I unfortunately had to skip because the font was so tall and narrow and oddly spaced that my poor eyeballs couldn't parse the letters on the screen. Because of the number of pages I had to skip, I'm not including this in my 2020 reading challenge.

This writer has talent, and is certainly very confident in that, going by the book's description on here; that's not by any means a criticism. It's admirable that this author is so bold in their work and doesn't feel restricted by convention or genre expectation. Few books of poetry in 2020 are genuinely subversive, but this book breaks more rules than it follows, and that's no bad thing. The rules are clearly broken here with an actual understanding of what that breaking means, which speaks to the author's dedication to their art and making something completely different.

However, I do think this book is so very personal and so specifically written as catharsis that it loses a lot of readability. It's so abstract - really, 119 pages of loosely connected ideas, diaphanous images and incredibly opaque metaphor - that it's very, very hard to get a grip on it. I love poetry. I love abstraction. But here, there were whole pages at a time where I felt completely adrift, and unable to connect to the work at all. Abstract ideas work if they're rooted in something just tangible enough for the abstraction to hold meaning, and these poems didn't do that for me. The author also desperately needs to stop relying on a thesaurus; for example, 'I will not stop / for bouts of amour / as I have in the / lucifugous past / the waiting hours penumbral', or 'my auroral blue pools / scintillating / with rain'. I know what all of those words mean in and of themselves, but that, as an image, is so difficult to access that it fails to be evocative. I will say that the later poems don't suffer so much from this, but the first half of the book is heavy with it, and it becomes a real chore.

The poems that work best are, in my very subjective opinion, the simpler ones, where Sidirov relies less on showing off his vocabulary. Azu's Wedding was probably my favourite; I enjoyed the closeness it invoked, the intimacy, the shifting nature of their relationship. I also liked the surreal absurdity of a lot of the imagery; There Are No Monkeys Here was quite delightfully weird, and one of the poems I'd quite happily sit and analyse. 'I don't know love but I do know loving' - that's just great, really. There were lots of lines in here that, by themselves, are excellent.

Sidirov's decision not to use page numbers and to instead label each page with a word / phrase which makes up a poem is brilliant, and, perhaps a little ironically, the poem that these page 'numbers' made was by far my favourite in the whole book, and one which will linger.

I think this author has talent, and could do a lot with it; I just feel like perhaps this book was written more for them than for us, and that's fine, but it certainly makes reviewing (and indeed reading) it a little tricky. I'd happily read their other work, but perhaps with the benefit of an editor who shares their overall vision.