Cover Image: I Love You, Call Me Back

I Love You, Call Me Back

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Member Reviews

Lovely resonating prose for sad girls who have become sad women, still grappling with all of the sadness that is growing up.

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Sabrina Benaim’s poetry is universal and can appeal to a large audience. It is approachable and perfect for those who are looking to dip their toes in the poetry genre, or for those who have maybe been turned off my academic poetry in the past. She also narrates her words beautifully if you like audiobooks.

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I Love You, Call Me Back is a powerful and relatable collection of poems that dives into the depths of loneliness, anxiety, and grief while finding unexpected moments of peace and joy. Sabrina Benaim's raw and heartfelt words shed light on mental health struggles and the uncertainties of life, reminding us that it's okay to embrace our whole selves and find courage even in the toughest moments. A moving read that resonates with anyone who's ever experienced the highs and lows of life.

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“The only thing we think we know for sure is the past But our memories are stories we tell ourselves to sleep at night”
“I watercolor peonies instead of picking new wounds.”

I thought that this collection was just absolutely beautiful. As someone who lives with a complicated relationship in terms of their mental health, I found this book to be raw, honest, beautiful and therapeutic. There are so many parts of this that resonated deep within my soul, and I think that this is a perfect example as to how healing writing can be and what a beautiful gift Sabrina has in her ability to be vulnerable and share her pain with others to make sure they feel less alone.

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I Love You, Call Me Back explotes feelings of loneliness, anxiety, uncertainty, anxiety, grief. In this collection of poems, Benaim really examines deep, intense emotions from multiple angles and through different experiences.

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I'm a sucker for word poetry like this. It wasn't the best but it felt real, and almost like a friend talking about their day. It was enough to feel seen in the text.

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I Love You, Call Me Back is a poetry collection that shows great promise.

Tackling mental health with insight and pouring emotion, writer Sabrina Benaim has a knack for making the smallest feelings feel significant. Quite often, the collection feels like chatting with an old friend, and her accessible writing is the cause for this.

In a world where “instagram poetry” seems to have taken over, and where true “art” seems lost, Benaim balances these two things perfectly. While her writing isn’t too abstract for the modern reader, she adds enough intellect and emotion for it to feel different from recent popular poetry.

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Far too heavy on spoken-word and insta-style poetry technique. Emotionally maximalist in unappealing ways.

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Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this title. These poems were almost painfully relatable at times, and I felt a lot of empathy for the narrator. It was overall a solid collection that told a compelling narrative, but the language didn't blow me away.

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I found the writing to be a bit heavy handed. Poetry is tricky to review since it’s subjective but I found this one challenging

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With I Love You, Call Me Back, Sabrina Benaim has gifted us with a collection that is both a blueprint for grief and a roadmap to help us find our way out of it. It’s not an easy task to meld hope and despair together in the same poem without coming off as maudlin or worse, melodramatic, but Benaim manages to do so with the grace and panache of an assured stylist.

Her voice rings so clear and true that while reading her new collection I felt like I was having a conversation with an old friend, one with whom I could share my highest hopes and biggest fears. After the past nineteen months of dealing with the isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, finally someone is saying that everything is not okay, but it will be eventually. And in the meantime, we can hold space for small joys, of which I count this poetry collection as one of them.

I Love You, Call Me Back: Poems was released by Plume, a division of Penguin Random House, on October 19th, 2021 and is now available to purchase wherever books are sold.

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“𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒚𝒐𝒖’𝒗𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓 𝒇𝒆𝒍𝒕 𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒍𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝒚𝒐𝒖”

I am a huge fan of spoken poetry and Sabrina Benaim is one of my absolute favorites. When she released her first collection of poems Depression & Other Magic Trick, I immediately bought it and purchased a surprise copy for my friend. The poem Explain Depression to My Mother was and still is relatable as fuck. I showed it to everyone (and still do to this day).

Soooo when I knew Sabrina was releasing another collection, I knew I HAD to have it. Luckily I was given the eARC through Netgalley and also happened to receive the finished book from Plume Books ~ but that wasn’t enough. I needed to HEAR Sabrina speak the poems so I also bought it on Audible. Yup, I’m obsessed. I already know. This collection is nothing short of amazing. It touches on grief, depression, loneliness and heartbreak. Once again, Sabrina puts out another relatable collection of poems. Also her multiple mentions of Mac Miller made me love her even more. I can’t wait for her next collection! READ THIS!

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I'm not a big reading of poetry person. I just never have been, but as I've been trying to read more nonfiction and things that aren't my norm (HA! right), when the publisher reached out it was a great opportunity to say yes.*

I do love spoken word poetry and Benaim has millions of views on hers (like Explaining My Depression to My Mother) and found the two the publicist sent to be incredibly beautiful and moving. I'll probably spend some more time checking out some of her other spoken word because the delivery is perfection.

So, I went in with an open mind and for the most part I enjoyed the collection. However, I think I would've enjoyed it infinitely more if it were an audio recording. Benaim's delivery has a lot of impact in her spoken word and I could definitely find the cadence and feel it in many of her written poems, but I feel like I a lot of them were lost on me because I struggled to find a cadence.

There were, however a couple that stood out as wonderfully poignant or hilarious with my three favorites probably being:

"July 7" where she talks about not having shaved her private area and understanding the 1970s
"Ode to Sexting" which was just beautifully written
"Panic Attack" a mantra/repetition that caught me off guard, but worked

There were many others that piqued my interest, especially those that used design and spacing.

Recommendation: Benaim's work didn't really change my mind on written poetry, but that's on me, not on the author. She writes about experiences that many people think need to be swept under the rug or hidden behind closed doors. I appreciate that she's still breaking down those barriers and doing it in such a beautiful way.

*I received a copy of I Love You, Call Me Back from the publisher via NetGalley in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

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Mental Illness and Relationships in a World of Loneliness

In 2020, a year of loneliness, illness ,and lockdowns, Sabrina Behaim’s poems explore the month of July. Fighting the problems of mental illness, she has the additional burden of her mother’s diagnosis of an aortic aneurysm when she is far away and can only be reached by the phone. She also has the sorrow of the end of a relationship and the need to move past grief.

The poems are a testament to resilience. Even when things are dark, Sabrina finds delight in eating ice cream for dinner and singing loudly. It’s good to remember that in darkness there can be light and moments to remember.

I thought the poet did a good job making mental illness relate-able. We all face the same sort of problems and the loneliness of the lockdowns made it worse for everyone, but for someone struggling with mental illness it takes even more courage to find the bright spots.

The poems are formatted in different ways. Some are formatted in lines of different lengths to emphasize words and feelings, others are great blocks of text. I admit I prefer the ones that are formatted. Dense block of text are off-putting, but they do convey a message.

This is a book I think many of us can relate to after the trials of 2020. It’s good to have more freedom.

I received this book from Dutton for this review.

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"I have become the queen of the uninspired"

10/10, 5/5, love everything about this book and finally getting around to reviewing it!! I finished it in one sitting and it really resonated especially after this past almost two years we've all endured. There are so many quotes I have highlighted/bookmarked to hand letter on my art account, everything was so beautifully put and I really felt the author's melancholy & anxiety during quarantine.

"Remember the day can be unspectacular & still a success" — wise words we all need to remember. Thank you Penguin Group Dutton, NetGalley & Benaim for this beautiful ARC.

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3.5 stars

Reflections on living with mental illness, relationships, family, uncertainty, loss. Some of the poems are brief & free form, some are prose-poem journal entries, some are somewhere in between. Not all the poems are exactly my style, but all of them have important things to declare.

[What I liked:]

•The arrangement of the poems in this collection is really neat. There are poems titled “July 1st” through “July 31st”, one for each day of the month that record that day’s struggles, accomplishments, fears, & survival. There are other poems in between these daily (almost like journal) entries, but the day-by-day path mapped through living out each one gives a precious sense of the survival that’s won moment by moment, a momentum to live & live fiercely.

•There is so much love in this book. The love that longs for a former lover yet still exists alone. The love, the sweet bond, of mother & daughter. The struggle to love yourself & live. They help me want to keep living.

•I appreciate how the poet talks openly about mental illness. How she doesn’t portray living with it as a smooth trajectory forward towards permanent healing. How she doesn’t take the difficult days & lapses as failures & keeps trying to live healthy despite them. How she addresses the helpfulness of psychotropic medications, but also the downsides she experiences.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•Sone of the poems are formatted as dense pages of text with no line breaks & no punctuation. That made it hard for me to follow. It’s not the stream of consciousness style I struggled with, mainly just the formatting.

CW: mental illness, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, self harm

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

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I Love You, Call Me Back is perhaps the singular most depressing collection of poems I've ever read, and I think a part of me regrets reading it, honestly.

I more or less liked Sabrina Benaim's last poetry collection a while back, and I thought her writing had a lot of potential, so I decided to give it another try. I do think her writing itself improved since then, and these poems are well-written, but something about them didn't click with me. I'm not sure if it's because the subject matter was so miserable, and I wasn't in the right head-space for it, or what, but I actually originally DNFed this book at the halfway point a month ago before finally caving and deciding to finish it.

Topics covered in this collection include obvious things like grief, loss of a relationship, coping with life in the COVID-19 pandemic, and fear of her mother's health problems, but it also delves into eating disorders, self-harm, and emotional abuse.

One last note: let me be very clear and say that I'm no fan of toxic positivity and my less-than-stellar review has nothing to do with the topics, just with the writing itself. I'll probably call it quits here for my relationship with Sabrina Benaim's writing as I just don't think it's for me, but this collection will hold a lot of value for the right reader.

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Having been a fan of Sabrina Benaim work, I did not enter into I Love You, Call Me Back without knowing how well Sabrina writes about emotions. I was pleasantly surprised with her newest collection. I Love You, Call Me Back is a collection of poems that explore a range of emotions during the month of July 2020. Sabrina Benaim captures a range of emotions that so many people can relate to, especially during the pandemic lockdown. While Sabrina Benaim captures heavy, difficult emotions, she surprised me when describing the relationship between her and her mother. A wonderful collection of poetry.

Thank you to Netgalley and Plume for the advanced copy.

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A poignant book of poetry framed during a month of uncertainty while her mother awaits surgery for an aortic aneurysm. There is a poem about butterflies and anger that resonated with me. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

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I Love You, Call Me Back is an ode to mental health. If you have wondered what depression or anxiety feels like or struggled to explain how your mental health impacts you, this book is the answer you have been seeking. It is a brutally honest look into multiple mental health concerns, all in the form of beautiful poetry. Panic Attack is accurate AF and I am kicking myself for not writing it. I love You, Call Me Back is a quick collection of poems taking place over the span of one month. It is a must-read for all. 4.5 stars

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