If Not, Winter was my first experience reading poetry for pleasure and it was certainly an odd place to start. Centuries-old fragments of Greek poetry are not an accessible entry point into the medium, that's for sure. I did enjoy the experience nonetheless. Poetry has always felt like a battle. I thought every line needed deep contemplation to read poems "correctly". It was freeing to experience the medium without the pressure of decoding meaning in every comma and line break for the first time. I learned through reading If Not, Winter that you are allowed to think as deeply or shallowly about poetry as you personally want. There isn't an English teacher waiting to fail you if you don't.

I know I didn't gain as much from reading If Not, Winter casually by myself as I would have in a classroom. I don't have the context and education to truly understand the majority of what Sappho was doing with her work. But, the scraps I could parse and the meaning I personally imbued in them was personally satisfying. Reading this collection was genuinely fun and I fell in love with some of the poems I read and was completely confused by others, but it was all a great time regardless.