I'm thinking tumblr poetry is just not for me. I just read [b:Milk and Honey|23513349|Milk and Honey|Rupi Kaur|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1491595510s/23513349.jpg|43116473] by Rupi Kaur, and I was actually expecting to like this more than milk and honey, especially given the title's implications that there would be a lot of fairytale imagery in this collection. Unfortunately, reading this collection felt like a flashback to my high school's literary club, because these poems felt so juvenile.

if you
don't want to
end up in
someone else's
poem,

then maybe
you should
start
treating
people
better
for
a
change
-an unapologetic poet

I actually laughed out loud at this one. This is just like the poems people wrote in high school about their crush who didn't like them back! I don't know how much harder I could have rolled my eyes.

You can write good short poems. You can still pack a punch in a short poem. This collection does not do that. Many of these poems are really just sentences with a word per line. The titles are overly explanatory. The fairytale imagery is nearly non existence. There's a lot of heavy themes in this book with regard to emotional abuse, eating disorders, and grief, but none of the poems seemed to say anything complex about these subjects. Everything was so surface level and you couldn't dig more into it. Sure the last section has feminist themes, but it's not even slightly nuanced. Like yes, I agree rape culture is bad, but you wrote a sentence more than a poem.

If I were to take these poems autobiographically, which I feel as though they are intended that way, then I'm deeply sorry for the things Amanda Lovelace has faced in her life. It's great that she can you poetry as a way to process her emotions. But unfortunately her style is just not for me.

I did want to share the one poem that packed a punch for me:

grief
clung to
her
like an
old,
itchy,
faded,
ill-fitting,
hand-me-down
dress.

(Typing that out and hitting enter so much was really annoying)