I read nayyirah waheed's 'salt' a few years ago and would have liked this collection a lot more if I hadn't. Honestly, it's pretty much the same book. Hicks-Wilson even uses full stops mid-sentence the exact same way that waheed does, and has done for years, and as beautiful as some of the poems are here, they're all so derivative that it felt like reading a book I'd already read before (McKayla Robbin's 'We Carry the Sky' is another book which reads almost identically to this one.) There's no unique voice here at all, as poetic and lovely as the voice often is, and it lets the book down; untitled, inspirational short form poetry about self-love, with a lot of sun, moon and ocean imagery and 'darling' thrown around a lot, is practically a genre in and of itself, and one collection of them is pretty much identical to the next. There's room for variation, even in this oddly specific genre, but this book doesn't deliver it.

I really did like some of the poems here a lot, particularly the longer ones, where Hicks-Wilson allows herself to develop an idea beyond a line or two. These are the ones which feel most like her own words:

'all words,
like us,
are ninety percent water

you can choose
to drown
in the ones that hurt

or,
you can choose
to let them
cleanse you.'

And even some of the shorter ones were evocative and lovely, and I re-read them a few times just to enjoy them over and over:

'it's not just ghosts
that come back.

the living do
too.'

but others are literally just Pinterest quotes (I even googled them to check):

'you should have been your first love.'

Yep, seen that one before.

This whole book reads a lot like a poet mimicking the voice of other poets, which is fine and a perfectly valid way for a poet to experiment and ultimately craft their own unique way of writing, but it means that it's really hard to view it as a work of art in and of itself, rather than just an addition to an identical canon. It'll appeal to anyone who enjoys that generic Rupi Kaur / Amanda Lovelace style of poetry, where it's all about getting over heartbreak and loving yourself in a series of three-line poems, and I genuinely think that Hicks-Wilson is incredibly talented. In particular, she has an impressive way of crafting gentle imagery that invokes warmth and comfort. She's also clearly impressively prolific, just going by the sheer amount of poems she's already written, and I think there are many better volumes to come from her. This is just a starting point, and it's not bad - it's even great in parts! - but it's just not as original as I think she's capable of.