Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately, by Alicia Cook

Okay so… I’m really glad I got to read some poetry collections I loved before reading this one, because if this was my first one, I would’ve ended up never reading another one ever again. To be honest, I found this one to be so boring, so unoriginal, that throughout its course it made me feel approximately nothing. And if the first part was a 2-star read for me, then the second part was pretty close to zero.

I don’t know if it was just me being unable to connect with the author and their thoughts, but every line I read made me feel like I had already read about this before, I already knew that, yawn yawn can we please move forward now? At the end of each poem there was a currently listening to query and most of the time i had no fucking clue how this particular song could have inspired this particular poem. Now, I do believe that this played a major part in why I didn’t enjoy this book: as a person that deeply loves and values music, seeing no obvious connection between the song and the poem made me feel disoriented, convinced me that the author and I were not on the same page – maybe we weren’t even on the same book.

As for part two, it’s probably the most poorly done blackout poetry I have ever seen. Sometimes the “verses” didn’t even make sense. It seemed a bit lazy, a bit hazy, a bit sloppy. It did, however, inspire me to try blackout poetry of my own this summer, so props to that! A pretty disappointing read, overall.

 

**An ARCopy was provided via Netgalley in exchange of an honest review**