Member Review

I keep reading Lovelace's collections in the hope that I can recapture the magic that I felt from the first two in her "Women Are Some Kind of Magic" series. Unfortunately, there's just something missing for me. Right off the bat, this new set of poems is way too short (it took me less than 20 minutes to read) and many of the poems are just one or two lines. I understand this is a stylistic choice, but it ended up feeling like the collection is not substantial enough. I appreciate Lovelace's fairy tale theme in most of her collections, but it felt like the motif wasn't taken far enough in this one. There's only a faint thread of Cinderella instead of a strong connection to the story. (For a more successful version of this, check out Nikita Gill's "Fierce Fairytales.") I'll probably still read Lovelace's works in the future because I do think her work is honest (especially when she's drawing attention to toxic relationships, trauma, eating disorders, etc.). I just hope that she's able down the line to really dig into these issues with poems that make me want to read them again and again.