(ARC received via Netgalley)

I really didn't get on with this one, and I wish so much that I could've. This just doesn't work for me as written poetry at all. There's no attention paid to rhythm or rhyme, the phrasing is clunky and awkward and often juvenile (the amount of times the word 'freaking' was used made me cringe) and all the emotions are so surface level that I just didn't feel anything. There's no depth of feeling or language here. It was like reading a stranger's diary.

As for the structure, I liked the idea of having interims where the poet talked confessionally about how the poems came to be and gave some context to each of them, but in actuality they were just repetitive, jarring and read like filler to make up for the fact that there weren't enough poems to warrant a collection. It felt like a missed opportunity.

I can absolutely see how these poems might have been cathartic for the author, and I can see how they would possibly work in a slam context, with the atmosphere and the author's delivery giving the emotional weight to the poems that the words themselves don't quite convey on the page, but this just doesn't work as a collection of poetry for me. Perhaps it could have been pruned and published as a chapbook, or as an accompaniment to one of the poet's shows, but not in this format.