I liked this less than Gibson's other collections, but then it was a compilation.  Regardless, it was amazing as always, and I hope to eventually see them perform.

I read this book awhile ago - thanks to y’all! And I absolutely loved it and still love to handsell to customers. I saw them not too long after perform in DC and they were, of course, incredible and made me cry so much. Andrea Gibson breathes so much hope into the devastation.

I'm not good with poetry, ans I'm not good with feelings in my social life. But I conected so much with this narrative.
I really love it. I'm going to search more about the autor, this deserves more recognition

My blog was down during the time I reviewed this book but I did post a review on Amazon. I love Andrea Gibson's poetry and would always recommend her to poetry lovers.

I'm a big fan of Andrea Gibson and was excited when I got approved to read a galley copy of their latest work. I've been a fan every since I saw Gibson in person about seven years ago at a conference. Take Me With You was a great continuation of their previous collections, which were all wonderful as well.

The topics highlighted in these poems were some i love to see shown in every form, for me however this didn’t really hit the spot. I imagine this is because the instagram/tumblr style of poetry isn’t for me, but i’m glad i read it and gave it a shot. I think i would read more of this author’s work if i came across it, but i wouldn’t run out on publication day.

This collection of poems is a quick and, at times engrossing, read. Some pieces hit in the gut and were extremely full of impact, especially those covering familial topics. Other pieces fell a little flat. Overall, a good collection and I loved the addition of the illustrations.

This is a witty, raw, and passionate collection of poetry that included a lot of enjoyable illustrations to go along with some of the poems. Gibson (they/them for the purpose of this review) is an LGBTQ poet who has the ability to cut themselves open and bleed all over the page. You feel the emotion behind their work and there are a lot of quotable bits inside. I will note that the ARC Kindle version I received was very difficult to read because of the layout, so I'll probably pick up a hard copy of this book so I can appreciate how it was intended to be read rather than the jumble that I just went through. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 

Andrea Gibson is one of those poets whose work always has something different for me when I return to it. Take Me With You is no exception. However, this is a work that will be at its best when read in a physical format, and since my review copy is an e-book, my experience with it was negatively impacted. This is mostly because the formatting didn't translate well in my review copy, and the final e-version will likely have these issues fixed. However, since formatting is so crucial to written poetry to help convey meaning, I had the frustrating sensation of missing out - it was difficult to tell what lines were intended to belong together, and which were meant to be separated into other ideas. The effect was to make the collection feel like a long and unintentionally disjointed, rambling poem.

For anyone who is familiar with Gibson's work, some of the content in Take Me With You will also be familiar. Lines from their most well-known poems are sprinkled in pieces throughout, a sort of remix that creates new experiences with these older works. I had mixed feelings about this. I recognized the larger works behind the excerpts, but the language and ideas felt less powerful than they do in the originals, and I felt like they detracted from the new material. In the end, I also realized that while there are some stunners in this collection, I wasn't really interested in this style of distilling powerful ideas into quotable micro-poems.

I read through Take Me With You multiple times, and true to course, something different spoke to me each time. The imagery and passion in Gibson's work is always stunning, and Take Me With You is no different. I would recommend this for people who are already familiar with Gibson, but I would hesitate to use this as an introduction to their work.

I really, really wanted to like this poetry collection. The author, Andrea Gibson, is non-binary and writes LGBTQ poems. I am a non-binary person who writes poems about being lesbian as fuck. On paper, it seems a perfect match.

However, this collection wasn’t for me. I don’t know if this was because of my Kindle formatting, or if Gibson’s work really is all over itself on the page, with random letters capitalised. I found it difficult to work out where a poem ended and where another began.

I’m also not a fan of free verse poetry. It seems like a cop out to me, and Gibson’s work reads more like abstract prose. Give me a terza rima or a sonnet any day of the week. Gibson also uses pop culture references that sour the poem, such as ‘You look like Marilyn Monroe and it makes me wanna run … for President’.

However, I just wanted to write down my favourite lines to prove that I actually did like some of the poetry! I can’t work out what poems these are actually from, but I hope you enjoy these lines too.

‘Do you know the night you told me you have a crush on my ears I swore to never become Van Gogh? [And look. They’re both still here.] The use of Van Gogh brings about this overwhelming idea of sadness and depression, and cutting bits of yourself up to offer up to other people. The second line also gives Gibson power, that she made a promise, and for once, she managed to keep it.

‘They want you to buy your blush from a store instead of letting bloom from your butterFlies’. Again, I’m not sure if the random F is just my kindle app playing up, but I love the alliteration of the line. It could do with some pruning, and for most of this book I wish I could go over it with a red pen, but I love the bloom and blush and butterflies.

‘It’s cold where I come from, I learned to drown young’. This is the type of line that I want to tattoo onto my rib cage, it makes goosebumps rise on my skin. Gibson’s past is summed up in one line, of feeling different, and wrong, and hurting constantly.

My final favourite line is this ‘half of us already dead to our families before we die‘. A powerful representation of LGBTQ children, and how we are cast out from our families, ignored and forgotten, and never spoken about again.

In conclusion, this collection will only be getting two stars from me. I only liked a certain few lines from the odd mismatch of poems, but I hope that Gibson will produce more interesting works in the future.

Thank you NetGalley for sending me an ARC in exchange for a review.

I LOVE Andrea Gibson's work and this is no different. I had the pleasure of interviewing her for a story a few years back, and I love seeing new pieces from her.

I didn't mean to read Take Me With You in one sitting, but the bus ride was long and at every page I felt more alive. It was an emotional roller coaster that I will certainly be taking again... and again and again and again.

These are excerpts of poems. Some of them were new to me, some I've had the pleasure of listening to live. Some of these few lines managed to take me right back to that extraordinary moment when Andrea Gibson was in front of me, their voice everything. They are magic and they are real.

I hope that whoever runs into this collection without having read them before feels the need to dive, eyes and heart open, into their complete body of work. It's an experience.

Couldn't be more grateful for the ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Take Me With You is definitely an appropriate title. As I finished reading I felt that this would be a wonderful book to keep with you and read passages from whenever life is getting you down because “beating yourself up is never a fair fight.”

There are three parts that cover sexuality, gender, politics, feminism, family and accepting oneself. I breezed through this little book in half an hour but I was so taken with it that I know I’ll find myself revisiting it often. Not to mention, the illustrations were such a delightful addition, I felt they added whimsy and charm to balance out the important topics mentioned in the text.

While I enjoyed every part of this little pocket book, I think Part I was my favorite. It reads like an open love letter. Maybe not in the traditional sense, but rather, to lovers past, present, and future. Gibson does an incredible job of capturing our state of mind as we become more aware of ourselves and our sexuality and how we interact with others.

The rest of the book I found myself nodding in agreement or smiling because it felt like they really get it, you know? It felt like the author was taking my hand and guiding me through. Not necessarily gentle at times, but in a way that I felt like I was truly learning something. I found that comforting. 

I’m admittedly not an expert in poetry and at times this book read more like a collection of statements, but each one touched me as an affirmation to some of my own feelings or as an eye opener to things I hadn’t thought about until now.

I would definitely recommend giving it a look.

Poetry and nice sayings and drawings. I've seen a published copy in the bookstore and the layout is much more interesting in print. As visual mediums tend to be, it's kind of a disaster in digital galley

I thoroughly enjoyed the little poetry book Take Me With You by Andrea Gibson. I like the fact that the author shares the entire range of their emotions and feelings - because that's what life is. Not just one thing or the other, not even at a specific time - there are more shades of grey than there are of black and white, because we are always feeling more than we can express in a simple way. We are a jumble of emotions, a muddy mix of colors, sharp, soft, biting, loving, hoping, wondering, resentful, grateful.... And Andrea Gibson shares them all with us. Some reviewers have disparaged this book as poetry-lite, or quips rather than poems. But if they make you feel, if they make you think, hasn't the goal been attained? 

P.S. - I like all the little drawings too!!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Plume for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions here are my own.

I got this ARC for review from Netgalley, so thank you! This was a really good book. I always liked Andrea's poetry. Ever since I stumbled upon their spoken word videos, their name has been on the back of my mind. Both longer poems and one liner were amazing and strong. There is one moment in this book where it says something along the lines of "every love poem I write ends up being political because I use the pronoun her", and I can't help but relating to that. Andrea beautifully talks about gender and love. It's queer poetry, through and through - They talk about loving girls. They talk about their experience with gender. And about violence and feminism. I couldn't stop highlighting sentences and paragraphs all through the book - let it be a poem about love or a poem about society, or both - a lot of them packed a punch.

I got this book because I knew the name. I didn't really know anything else. I had seen some of her spoken word performances on youtube from when I was a baby queer. I was only thirteen or fourteen the first time I heard the name. I never really stopped to appreciate what was before me. 

This book jumps around from topic to topic, line to line, in a frenzied pace. It was wonderful. It was like reading the thoughts of someone who is brilliant from experience, not studying. So many of the lines related to my life growing up queer, though out queerness is a bit different in the end. 

There were lines that called back what I had learned in college in my Women and Gender Studies classes. The idea that anyone could classify their love as political or just writing a poem with a pronoun change could be dangerous or wonderful. That feeling I had then of how wrong some things are and how they need to change, only grew more powerful reading that someone else had that thought and it seemed so nonchalant. 

This book did things to me. I swear I will be a fan of poetry if this trend of liking poetry books keeps happening.

I wasn't expecting to love this as much as I did! I flew right through it and immediately picked it back up again! I had a pieces I wasn't a fan of, but overall a really solid collection!

Take Me With You is a poetry pocket book highlighting a wide variety of relatable topics, split into three sections: Love, The World, and On Becoming. These poems talk about the good and bad parts of love: how it feels to love someone, to be loved, and to have your heart broken. Gibson also tackles big themes about the world such as creation versus destruction, women's rights, the internal struggle of someone who is transgender, feminism, heaven, the broken parts of America, gun violence, tolerance, veterans, war, the pressures social media put on us, and kindness. In the last section titled "On Becoming" Gibson shares thoughts on struggling painfully through mental health challenges like anxiety in order to end up at a place where you love ALL of yourself, including the flaws which help to make you who you are.

After reading other reviews I think the final book is three long poems rather than a bunch of short poems. I read the ebook version which had each poem on a different page. Reading these words as three long poems would be a completely different experience.

There are some insightful and unique comparisons such as, needing someone as much as the moon needs the sea, or comparing a room in a home to the palm of a hand, or how in Autumn the leaves fall as if they are in love with the ground.

Either way, Take Me With You is a delightful little book about HOPE and I would recommend this to everyone, especially to readers who want to read more poetry that isn't filled with complicated prose.

Go to Andrea Gibson’s website, https://www.andreagibson.org/ and see how they are marketing this little pocketbook of inspirational quotes.

"A pocket book, by Andrea Gibson. Out January 23rd, 2018
A book small enough to carry with you, with messages big enough to stay with you, from one of the most quotable and influential poets of our time.
Andrea Gibson explores themes of love, gender, politics, sexuality, family, and forgiveness with stunning imagery and a fierce willingness to delve into the exploration of what it means to heal and to be different in this strange age. Take Me With You, illustrated throughout with evocative line drawings by Sarah J. Coleman, is small enough to fit in your bag, with messages that are big enough to wake even the sleepiest heart."

Andrea Gibson is a non-binary spoken word artist whose YouTube videos are heartfelt and powerful. I dare anyone to listen to the video ‘Orlando” and not be affected by her honesty and powerful presence. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNadn...

This little pocket book moved me. Gibson distills the thoughts of many of us living on the fringe of accepted society. Well done. 

eARC received with thanks from publisher via NetGalley for review.