Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this in exchange for an honest review.

This was such an interesting concept, diving deep into mental illness like I haven’t seen before.

I appreciate the author doing this and this was a good read!

Is This Scary? is a collection of poetry focused on the topics of mental health and general illness. Being a former Mental Health Nurse I was drawn to the mental health topic and was really intrigued by Jacob's experience. The poems cover a range of more specific topics such as mood, life on a psychiatric ward, medication, and even suicide. Personally, I was fine with these however, some people may struggle with those topics whether it be triggering for them or that they find the topics hard to understand due to medical terms.
I do want to acknowledge how hard it must have been for Jacob to write these poems. Whilst society is gradually moving towards a better understanding and acceptance of mental illness there are still some stigmas associated with it and getting to the point where he could have written about them so openly and honestly must have been a difficult journey.
This specific type of poetry in the book and the way it's written isn't my thing and I couldn't really connect with any of the poems or emotions behind them. So whilst I can't really say that I enjoyed the book as such, it was still very interesting reading about mental illness from an own voices perspective.
I feel that poetry is very difficult to really categorise in terms of style. What one reader relates to another may not. It really is a very specific connection to each individual poem / collection. So my advice to anyone who is considering reading this book is to just give it a try. You won't know until you do.

I loved the cover design and the title, but this collection of poetry was not for me. I really wanted to love it due to the subject matter as someone who also suffers with mental illness, but I just found that could not connect with the poems. That being said, there were a few good poems/lines in this book and the others weren't bad just not memorable.

I wouldn't recommend this book for most people, but I am looking forward to seeing more from the author in the future.

The ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was originally draw to “Is This Scary?” because of the title and the idea of reading poetry about mental and physical illness, which are extremely heavy topics that come with a lot of stigma. Even though it is poetry I think Scheiers writing was surprisingly really informative and factual. Unfortunately, I liked the idea of this work more than I liked the poems themselves. I liked reading them, but they weren’t memorable and didn’t stick with me.
I would however recommend this book; I think the concepts are there and might hit harder for others.

In this collection of poetry following Scheier's experience with depression, suicidal ideation, and being a patient in a mental health treatment center. This poetry collection is difficult for me to rate, because it's such a personal account from the author and I would never want to minimize his experience. That said I couldn't help but feeling quite dumb while reading this. I felt like I needed a syllabus to be able to follow along and pick up on all the nuance more efficiently. I did appreciate at the end there being a short key of references for specific poems because it made me understand the richness better.

I enjoyed this book. It touched on things like depression and suicide as subject matter so it could be a trigger warning for some.

Thanks to Net Galley for the advanced copy of this book.

I was drawn to “Is This Scary?” first by the title and cover design, and then to the concept of a poetry collection about experiencing both mental illness and physical ailments, as well as the treatment of the two.

In that sense, I really enjoyed this collection. I did quite a bit of googling about the different treatments and medications depicted in Scheier’s writing, and I thought it was clever how he wove in specific references to each of them. I feel like I learned a lot! I do appreciate that Scheier’s poems are honest and make no attempt to glorify living with mental illness as I’ve seen others do, but rather, he offers a look into how difficult, overwhelming, and cyclical it can feel. As someone who experiences a different kind of mental illness, I think he captured those struggles and how they come and go very well.

My personal favourites from the collection were “To My Friends Who Did Not Visit Me in the Mental Hospital,” “Circular Labyrinth,” “Self-Parenting,” “Song to the Suicides,” as well as “And Then Job Answered God from inside the Whirlwind They Were Both Caught inside of.” In these poems, I was struck by the format, and by the unique connection between mental illness and things I had not thought of. For example, the idea of those cyclical feelings being like trapped in a labyrinth stood out to me. Additionally, I’m always a big fan when authors link biblical references with their poems.

While there were a lot of poems that held me and I found myself thinking about afterwards, oppositely, I did not find his poems related to love to be memorable to me. The imagery and metaphors were not as strong as those found in other works.

Overall, I would give this collection 3.5/5 and I would be interested in reading more from Scheier in the future.

i wish i liked this more. scheier addresses such important topics, topics i wish were tackled in poetry more often. institutionalization, suicide, the 'uglier' sides of mental illness that people so often cringe away from. and to be fair, scheier does do an excellent job of tackling these topics with a delicacy that is not infantilizing, and a strength that is not brutalizing. not once did i feel that these poems were romanticizing or dehumanizing and i highly admire that, for those are fine fine lines. however, i just didn't feel like i could really get into a lot of these poems. but i really don't know why. i...can't put my finger on it. something about these poems made it difficult to connect to and enjoy but i really have no idea what it is. his imagery, his prose are all wonderfully descriptive. he played with many different styles, from odes to prose poetry to 'email' style poems, and it's all very creative, but idk something was off. i wish i could better explain what exactly made me feel iffy about these poems but i really could not tell you if i tried. overall, i'd still recommend it if you want some poetry that does well to address and break the stigma around institutionalization, suicide, mental illness, etc., but i can't say i had a good time myself.

Personally this just wasn’t for me, it was very well written and descriptions were very vivid but overall, it’s not my kind of thing.
I did attempt to get into it and this was my first poetry book I selected, I imagine if you enjoy poetry and understand poetry then this would be really really good, as I said the descriptions and the wording used was very clever, it felt very emotive and indeed quite ‘scary’ in parts. It broaches subjects that are normally quite taboo so I believe if you enjoy poetry you would love this, it just wasn’t for me.

***Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review***
While I was hoping for a horror filled book or poetry, I was enthralled by the sad and poignant prose I found. Mostly focusing on suicide and death, I was moved and, yes, even a little scared.

Had trouble getting into these and really didn’t connect to the poetry itself. Was just expecting something different and disappointed in myself for not liking these

Okay, honestly I am unsure of how to feel after reading this book. I appreciate how it is breaking the stigma around mental illness and can allow people to see their struggles represented in poetry. I liked the interwoven aspects of how the speaker was talking to someone but felt that I had a hard time connecting with half of the poems simply for the fact that the writing felt borderline pretentious. Overall I most likely will not be picking this up again but can see others enjoying it. I would give it an overall 2.5 if I could.

I love a poetry book. But these poems were incredibly dense. I found some of them difficult to read, and I couldn't connect.
Yet others I really loved - particularly some of the emotions attached to medications - as I am currently/have in the past taken the same medications and can completely relate.

The overall book was just too hit & miss for me, and there were far more poems that I didn't like than those I did.

"I’m afraid of everything, of nothing and there was nothing to fix."
A nice quick read. With pretty dark poems.
I enjoyed reading this. There where some lines that really stood out through out these pages too like:
"I try to wash your absence off and my hands bleed."
Definitely worth a read.

I’ve dealt with mental illness and thought I was resignations with this book. Unfortunately I struggled getting through it. Everyone’s story is different, I just wish it felt easier for people who haven’t been in this situation to understand.