This was a great poetry book. I always absolutely enjoy their work and I can't wait to read more in the near future. I highly recommend it.

I love to read poetry but I have a very hard time composing my thoughts into a review. For me, the measure of good poetry is how it makes me feel and feelings are hard to put into words. I liked this collection but it wasn't my favorite. Some of the poems I connected with and some I didn't.

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Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This book of poetry is has a beautiful cover with images of flowers throughout the book. The poems and sayings are inspiring. For some reason the page with the saying "I want to be the one whose arms you run to whether you have reason to rejoice or cause to collapse." hit me the hardest.

I think if this wasn't marketed as a poetry collection, I would've liked it more. The 'poetry' was more like a self-help advice column on self-love, grief and how to improve your relationship styled as poetry by manipulating the line length. I liked the aesthetically pleasing layout of the book like the millennium trash I am, full with the short poems, pictures, the coloured black/pink pages in between, the quotes, the attractive colour scheme, but other than that this was just a disappointing and bland read.

Admittedly, some 'poetry' (yes, I'm going to use quotation marks every time I write the word poetry because this was far from it) evoked emotions and wasn't bad in its general advice as I could see how some people could actually be benefit from reading this book. Unfortunately, there was just scarce content I found relatable, most of it was very focused on love and relationships and that might help and ring with someone actually facing challenges in their relationship but was plain eye-roll-ish stuff for me. Moreover, I noticed frequently that the same advice was rehashed again and again using different words which made this a repetitive concoction of similar themed 'poetry'. To be honest, I feel betrayed because I signed up for quality poetry not for this advice on how to make your relationship better 101 'poetry' guide.

Towards the end 'poetry' didn't get similar themed but literally repetitive COMPLETELY e.g.

"I'll go to parties and mingle,
and even feign interest in the
conversation, but on the inside my heart is endlessly elsewhere."
- Excerpt from "Elsewhere".

"I can be in a room full of friendly faces, surrounded by laughter and celebration, but to me, it's all just light and noise. I will smile and make small talk, but it's all a performance.
The truth is, I'm someplace else with you."
- Excerpt from "The performance".

As always, I do appreciate how some poems radiated private stories in all that they were and how reading them I felt like they were an ode to the person the author was writing about. Basically, I like that the author stayed true to his emotions which gave that personal feel to the 'poetry'. But everything else just trumped the few good things about this 'poetry' collection and this wasn't my cup of tea. I'm pissed even more because I requested his second collection based on the assumption that I would like this one and the cover and now I have to read and review that too! GREAT!

Advice to future self: Stop falling for beautiful covers, idiot.

Amazing collection of poetry. The language is thoughtful yet direct. I enjoyed some more than others.

This was a good collection of poems.
I related a lot and flew through it.
It was very enjoyable.

I have rather mixed feelings about this book as a whole. Beau Taplin is definitely talented, but then here's the issue that (at least according to me), he's not able to channel it properly. There were some pieces in this book that were absolutely beautiful, but at the same time there were pieces that were so out of context and lousy that it made me feel like it was simply lowering the quality of the book as a whole.

A famous Australian author and a literary sensation worldwide that I personally just discovered, he creates poetry stories about life and loss, questioning without requesting an answer or a solution. The words are flowing quietly, like a calm river making its way through a lonely forest.
It is the simplicity of every single gesture that matters and the writer's eye and art to put the words together to re-create a new world.

Beau Taplin’s Bloom is a beautiful collection of poems focused on deep love, self introspection, and the value of being true to oneself. Most of the poems in this collection are fairly short, and all are thought provoking.

Several of these poems spoke to me on a very deep level. Many actually made me uncomfortable because it challenged deeply ingrained notions of being unworthy. Good poetry does that, you know? Makes you look at things differently, and see beauty in everything, even one's own broken self.

I loved the various ways the poems were presented. Some pages were black, with white text, and some pages contained inspirations in large swirly font. Bloom is a work to read and reread, learning new things each time.

***Many thanks to Netgalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for providing an egalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I had never read any poetry from this author but this collection of short poems are all stunning and meaningful at the same time. Loved it.

This is another netgalley freebie that I am going to add to my 'must-own-physical-copy' wishlist.

Thank you for sending me this galley, however unfortunately I was unable to access this book on my e-reader.

A most wonderful collection of soul searching and hard hitting poems.
Taplin's most complex thoughts and feelings are expressed beautifully and I think most people will find something that resonates within themselves and makes them ponder their own life experiences.
This poet captures the crazy collection of emotions we go through just functioning, socialising and loving and makes us analyse them in away you can only marvel and smile at.
I dipped in and out of this book over a few days and enjoyed it very much and would recommend it.

Bloom by Beau Taplin is another one of those collections that's trying to bank off of the trend in contemporary poetry. Unfortunately, this one does not meet the standards of some of the other collections that have come out in the past two years.

Bloom has three distinct types of work within the collection: the I poems, the You poems, and the full-page sentences that are reminiscent of a magazine pull quote. The first type of poems, the I poems, are ones that the poet addresses from the first person perspective. Most of these seem like love notes, but not ones that are any more complicated than the notes everyone passed in middle school. There's really no urgency or connection that speaks to the love being more than an infatuation inspired by boredom.

The second poems, the You poems, are a bit patronizing to the reader. These poems tell you how you should live your life and how to feel. Also, these poems will quickly remind most readers of those long quote memes posted all over the internet--the ones that people post to be inspiring, but end up really saying nothing.

The full-page quotes are like those Safe Auto commercials, the ones where the voiceover goes "This is a bad quote." They don't make much sense and are written in a very hard-to-read font.

What does this collection have going for it? A very beautiful layout and design. If I hadn't already explored what's inside, I would have picked this up for the design alone. It is going to look amazing as a paperback, but reading it as an ebook is difficult on the eyes when it switches from black to white pages. Overall, it's not what I'm looking for in poetry, but I'm sure that there are some out there that enjoy it.

I liked this. There were still the themes of self-empowerment, love, and loss as in most poetry books coming to light these days, but I appreciated that these were more than pop-poetry pieces. The style was not my favorite, but much more poetic and involved than much of what I have read in the poetry world recently. Plus, many of the pieces felt like they were speaking directly to me, which is what a solid writer can do - through one into each and every.

Plus, the design was beautiful.

I have no doubt that the finished copy of Bloom will be beautiful, but it’s unfortunate when a book’s design outshines what it contains.

The collection overall is quite angsty and remains very superficial. There are also a number of repetitive poems (see “The Slow Death” and “Walk Toward the Light” or “The Wrong Turn” and “Spectacular Occurrences”) that make me feel like the author was just going wild with a thesaurus rather than coming up with different poems. This is maybe intentional (in an effort to have themes and images recur throughout the collection) but if that is indeed the case, it was poorly done and made getting through an already banal book even more tedious.

I think that fans of Rupi Kaur will like this book though and I suppose it could be a good way of getting people who don't normally read poetry to give the genre a chance, but it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review "Bloom" by Beau Taplin. While poetry hasn't always been my thing, this poetry book has changed my outlook on it. I was blown away by how I was able to relate to each of the poems. These poems took me through a timeline of memories and emotions, even giving me hope for what is to come in the future. The emotions were raw and nothing was held back. I loved the brutal honesty and emotions that were present. Looking forward to reading more poetry from Beau Taplin in the future :)

This book is beautiful and I especially love the visuals inside but I can't really relate much to the "poems" inside. They're definitely different than the trend nowadays and although it's a plus point for me, I still don't think they're my cup of tea. They're not terrible, but they could have been better.

I do recommend this for people who love reading about inner turmoil and personal growth more than romantic poems.

Bloom is a poetry collection of 140 poems about growth and renewal, about love, grief and learning from them.

Bloom was such a beautiful and short poetry collection. I love reading poetry when I’m looking for something to ease my mind, not to think about college and my exams, to just relax and enjoy the art that the poet has written. Beau Taplin is such a talented poet and I enjoyed reading his poems and I cannot wait to discover more of his work.

I really liked that there was a theme in this book. Everything is light pink, white or black. There are several poems per page and sometimes you have a page with a poem in a beautiful and big font (with a pink, white or black background).

Here are the poems that I really liked:
Fools Together
The Slow Death
Sweet as a Smile
The Softest Blue
Recovery Time
Unexpected Arrival
Illuminate
Imperishable
My Best Self
Anxiety
Yes Man