I deeply enjoyed Kate Baer's first poetry collection What Kind of Women, and so I was excited to get approved for an ARC on Netgalley for her second collection I Hope This Finds You Well. I was even more excited when I realized that this collection consisted entirely of erasure poems.

For those of you who aren't familiar or don't follow Baer on Instagram (which you should), erasure poems are poems in which she takes messages (sometimes from critics and sometimes not) and turns them into poetry by blacking out words/letters. I've really enjoyed seeing these from her, and these poems were excellent. Not only is is a triumph to literally create art out of your trolls, but also the poems deeply resonate when they are paired with the comments that spurred them. I just love it.

My only complaint is that, once again, I'd love to see a longer collection from Baer. Perhaps one day I will. Either way, this collection is definitely recommended.

If you love poetry and enjoy reading a creative come back to negative internet trolls this is the book for you. I may not agree with all of Baer’s opinions but, I do enjoy creativity with regards to her content. I think this is an enjoyable read and definitely had me thinking about how we currently consume things on the internet and all the negativity that is thrown at people by others who do NOT actually know them in real life.

I am continually in awe of Kate Baer—her poetry, wit, and the way she can so gracefully slam dunk on her haters (and her haters feel like all of OUR haters, so it’s very satisfying). You can feel her empathy and emotion oozing off every page. I have adored her blackout poetry since I saw it on Instagram and so I very much enjoyed this collection of blackout poems, some of which I remembered and some of which were new to me. Kate has turned into an auto-buy author for me, so I look forward to reading and absorbing any and all of her future works. Thank you NetGalley and HarperCollins for providing an advanced reader copy in exchange for this honest review.

Kate Baer's writing will forever and always cut straight to the core. I find her prose so beautiful and enchanting, and reading her work is like falling asleep wrapped up in your favorite comforter with your comfy socks on. You can always rely on it to hold you! Thank you for the opportunity to devour this new work from Miss Baer herself.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I had never heard of Baer before this, but I am so glad I stumbled on this piece of work. I had to read the intro to understand what was going on, but once I got the gist of it I thought it was a really creative idea in what she did. It also shows you the "bad" side of the internet and what women have to deal with on a regular basis and it was really cool that she could turn it into something positive.

I follow Kate Baer on Instagram and read her first poetry collection last year so I knew I would love this collection even more. In it, she shares erasure poems in which she takes messages, comments, and pieces of writing she's received or seen and creates entirely new meaning by blocking out some of the words. I love this format so much and I love that Kate Baer has decided to make some of the poems a response to the message itself. Reading through this was a breeze and at times funny but mostly powerful in its ability to completely change a text's significance.

This is another collection that I'll add to my physical shelves. Many thanks to Netgalley for the free copy!

Kate Baer’s new book of erasure poetry comes out in November, and in it, she uses erasure poems to reframe the words directed at her by angry men, messages from women about our misogynistic culture, and texts from politics and our wider culture.


Women are often targeted and bullied when using social media or engaging in other public spaces, and Baer acknowledges up front that what she has faced pales in comparison to the harassment faced daily by queer, trans, and BIPOC folks. If you follow her on social media, some of this poetry will be familiar, and some are new takes on other source material.

While not everyone of these poems hit as hard as others, some take my breath away. The absolutely spareness of the language, the way her words cut right to the heart—this is a master class on trolling the trolls, both those her in DMs and those in our culture at large.

I want to extend a thank you to NetGalley for receiving a copy of Kate Baer’s poetry collection in exchange for an honest review.

What I love most about this collection is the uniqueness. Baer takes other written pieces and makes them her own. She eliminates words to leave behind beautiful poetry. I’ve seen other people do similar things, but they aren't quite like Baer’s.

I also loved that some of these were in response to negative things that have been said about her/others. I think that’s a super creative way to respond to harsh comments-- make something beautiful out of them! It made it more personal. Having said that, it wasn't all negative; some of them were pieces of fan mail that she made into something even more beautiful!

The only thing I didn’t like about it was how political it was in some parts because I like to escape politics when reading. However, this is her collection, and she should be able to express whatever she wants!

Kate's first poetry collection was a strong 5-star read for me, but this one didn't have the same kind of impact. This erasure poetry is well done but lacked the raw vulnerability of her previous work. It was a very interesting concept for a poetry collection but I wanted more of Kate's voice in this. I will still read whatever she writes now and into the future!

Thank you Harper Perennial for the ARC. While I appreciate Kate’s clever response to the online hate she receives, her voice doesn’t really come through in this collection. Instead her usually thought provoking social commentary was reduced to brief subject lines. Overall, this was a creative risk that didn’t really hit the mark for me.

I love Kate Baer's poetry, including her erasure poems, so I was really excited to be able to read this. I read it all in one sitting, and my only complaint is that I wish it were longer!

I Hope This Finds You Well is made up of erasure poems Baer wrote using comments, messages, and quotes from people like Donald Trump and AOC. The comments and messages written to Baer range from harassment to heartfelt thanks, and Baer makes beautiful poetry and powerful statements out of all of them. I'm so impressed with the way she can see turns of phrase in hateful messages, and the way she can pull out the core of a statement in such a concise way.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes poetry, has been on the receiving end of rude messages from strangers, or is interested to know what it's like being a woman on the internet (though of course, as Baer notes, she's white and cis and thus doesn't experience the worse levels of harassment trans and POC folks do).

Thank you to Netgalley and Harper Perennial for the chance to review this ARC.

Thanks to Harper Perennial for the free book.
I loved Baer's poetry book, What Kind of Woman, so I was super excited to get to read an early copy of this book. Both of these books are ones that deserve a permanent place on my shelves. In this poetry collection, Baer takes messages she receives and creates erasure poems from them. Changing the messages gives the words so much power. For the positive messages, it amplifies the importance. For the negative messages, it gives it a whole new meaning to the words that were meant to cut down others. The poems are beautiful, impactful, and thought provoking. I can't wait to revisit them over and over again.

I absolutely adore the creative process behind this book. The idea of taking negatively charged messages and comments and finding a way to stand on top, morph, and create something else, is so satisfying. Erasure poetry seems like it would be difficult, in more ways than one.

While this collection is brief, it’s pretty powerful. Some of these were so well done and some fell kind of flat for me. I do think the sheer number of poems limits the reach of this collection and wish it was longer.

I read this collection over a few days. There were times that the dark corners of the internet caused me to pause and take a break. I’ve received these types of messages myself and it really made me think about how social media impacts us, comment to comment, photo to photo.

All in all, I enjoyed this collection and would read more from the author.

Thank you to Netgalley and Harper Collins for an e-arc of this collection!

3.5*
This was fun and enjoyable. I love reading poetry and this collection was certainly a different way of looking at it. The collection was properly titled I hope this finds you well, like many of the dreaded emails we receive on a daily basis. I thought the approach to poetry while entwined with political issues was refreshing and different. It was interesting to see Kate's reactions and responses and I love how she turned troll like emails and comments into positive thinking and poems. I love poetry collections and I thought this was perfectly relevant in 2021.

I Hope This Finds You Well is one of the most beautiful poetry books I have ever read. Author Kate Baer takes negative reviews, comments, posts said about herself and other women and by using blackout poetry, creates the most beautiful and uplifting poems. I marked so many of them that I keep re reading in times of insecurity. This book should be a staple in every woman's home and office. It's such an uplifting piece of literature!

Blackout or erasure poetry can be good when done well. This just wasn’t it. Some I liked, but some just didn’t even make sense.

Before listening to the author explain erasure poetry to me I don't think I would have picked up this book. It is fascinating to me on two levels - first, because it takes a caustic message (hate mail) and filters out the negative to leave a skeleton positive message. Second, because of the author's incredible talent to see that positive message. Kate Baer uses email and letters that she received as well as speeches and snatches of news, tv etc as inspiration. In every case the negative remarks are stripped to reveal a hidden hopeful message written in a year that felt very hopeless at times. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

I love poetry. I don’t read nearly enough of it and I thought that Kate Baer is so clever to take words from emails and messages and make them something totally different. It seems very cathartic and I’m looking forward to seeing more work like this!

I am not a poetry reader AT ALL, and I absolutely loved this collection. Clever, funny, sad, perfect. I immediately bought her first book after reading this arc and am loving that as well. Maybe I don’t hate poetry?

I don;'t think Kate Baer is a terrible writer. I appreciate her acknowledgement of herself as a white cis woman. She provides a disclaimer in the beginning which is sort of bare minimum but at least shows an attempt to understand her place in power so to speak. And I can see where her particular voice would connect--predominately white women and maybe other individuals who have shared experiences. I think for me, it doesn't connect because of my own Blackness and Queerness where I rest in the intersections she cannot fully fathom. I feel like the concept, the erasure structure and formation of the poems were technical and very well executed. The place where she pulls from and the ability to articulate and reroute the vitriol of the comments is fine. Its just begs the question of how can resources in publishing can be redirected to marginalized voices that are not white. I think I am tired of white woman who mean well in there work being in constant circulation because it does clog the industry with a very monochrome cadence. This of course isn't to say, as I stated, the writing wasn't decent--it is to say that if another white woman no matter how tame and fine she doesn't add a transition of focus away from white supremacy and colonization that publishing companies maintain by constantly witnessing white women for simply existing. I feel like white women do not give up their positions of being easy circulatory facets in the industry. Where resource could be distributed to bolster people that are silenced--at the end of the day for me it is just another white voice in the pretty pervasive sea of white voices that swallow around the very needed voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous.