Books like Mad Woman

I received an ARC copy of this book for an honest review:I went into this with an open mind, very excited for what it contained. The title alone had me excited to feel: Mad Woman. While the content is blunt, unreserved, and clearly personal, I feel it lacks something crucial. Some of these pieces are intimate, others angry, but overall it’s missing that one thing that makes a piece memorable, none of them leave any impression. Poetry, as I understand it, is subjective to an extent. In the end, it’s the author’s piece and he/she had a specific message to relay, and I just couldn’t get it here. A lot of these pieces are filled with clichés phrases like “Nails on a chalkboard” or “my ears will bleed” and “I eat wolves for breakfast” I admire the writers passion and can respect her pain. I wish she could condense her pieces. Maybe re read them, think about how you can leave a bigger/better impact. Instead of telling me in detail how and why you feel so hurt or betrayed or damaged, tell me instead in small, powerful, and meaningful words. Give me an image to keep in my mind or a single line that will tell me what the entire piece really means. For example, in one of the pieces, the speaker says about truth, “it’s both foreign and home on my tongue.” This is one of my favorite lines of the book, it left me craving more and it hits me in the gut in a way I can understand it and keep the feeling it with me. However, I don’t feel it fits very well with the poem overall (When I Ramble About Love It Makes Sense). Like the rest ofthe poem it is random and every stanza is about something else, confusing me. In this piece, like many others, there is a lack of punctuation/enjambment and in this particular piece it works. Not just because of the title but because it forces me to read through without a break. In other pieces the lack of punctuation confuses me because when I read the poem out loud the emphasis seems to either be missing or it is in the wrong place. There is another piece called “Monster” where the speaker mentions Frankenstein and other “monsters” she’s dated- the reason I find this confusing is because when I read into it, try to find the depth, I can’t. If I try to take it at face value, not look into it too much, it feels forced and incomplete. The art in between the pages I actually do like. It seems to relay the emotion we will be reading about next. Overall, I enjoyed the book but in myopinion it is lacking. I re read it, and then read them out loud but it didn’t work for me. I am not sure what kind of audience I would recommend this too because anyone who enjoys poetry as much as I do, I think would have the same to say. But then again everyone is different, and as subjective as poetry can be, someone else may take it completely different than I did.