I'm not sure about the title of this book. With that title, I think I was expecting more assonance or alliteration or something of that nature. Instead the only major repetition I'm seeing is the imagery of horses and some repeating poem titles. The repeating poem titles is actually a choice I liked. It feels like it's signifying a life pattern where history seems to repeat itself but not exactly the same way each time. Or, because of the nature of this style of poetry that fills the page with a lot of impactful but not always clearly connected imagery, it might be more accurate to say the poems with repeating titles kind of feel like reoccurring dreams with slight variations in image or narrative.

This might just be a style preference, but I didn't love many of the decisions to go for short line lengths in the many poems in this collection that featured them. Not saying short line lengths are always a bad thing, but in most of these cases, it felt disruptive to the feelings, images, and experiences being presented and I didn't see the benefit of the short lines. Unless the intention IS for the reading experience to be disrupted, but if that's the case I would expect to see that shown in maybe another method or two in the poem so that it feels really intentional to the reader.

There was also an interesting juxtaposition between what felt like older world experiences with animals, villages, crowns, preietesses, carts, carriages, and opera houses.l; and in some poems: cars, televisions, airplanes, F-15s, and more. In "Charity Balls (the second version)" these two ideas seem to connect with mentions of Joan of Arc but also tiled bathrooms and chocolate wedding cake.

In some cases, I feel like this choice stretches the cohesiveness of this collection, but on the other hand, there might be generational theme happening here of parents vs child, ancestors vs kin, or maybe just time moving forward while some things repeat or stay the same.

One of my poetry teachers used to say, "poems aren't puzzles" but many people still choose to write them that way. Which brings me back to the title of this collection. The title should give us a clue to the themes of these poems and how they all tie into one another. It's what's making me think that cycles and time are likely factors and themes in these poems.

But I also get the sense that there was more this poet was trying to get at that they left us little indication of and instead are expecting the reader to gather the clues and put the puzzle together. If that's true, I think that's a detriment to these poems. The poet is clearly a talented writer. When it comes to poetry though, intentionality showing in your work goes such a long way in connecting with readers and I would have liked to see a little more of that here.

My favorite poems in this collection were: "Raspberry Syrup", "In This Light the Junk Undergoes Transfiguration; It Shines", and the "Charity Balls" series.

Despite some of my criticisms, overall I enjoyed this collection and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in response poems (many poems in this collection are responses to other works which are listed in the end notes), poems featuring horses, and poems with very dreamlike qualities.

Thank you Netgalley, University of Chicago Press, and Cynthia Cruz for sending me this advanced review copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

This was a lovely little book of poems. Short and sweet, with a nice depth of emotion. I don't know if I really felt the Freudian influence, but it was still an interesting quick read.

Arc review.

I find it hard to really review this book.
It is very interesting, and there are good poems in there.
But it is also really hard to follow.
I hoped for a bit easier to understand poems, since I was really intrigued by the description.

Which is why I would give it like 3/3.5 out of 5.
It is short so really worth it to try it if you are interested in the subjects.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, but overall okay?

Thank you so much for everyone involved for the arc!

This book can be read in a couple of hours. Poetry has come far since modernists like Pound and Eliot put bullets in the body of meaning and the critic Ciardi, John, told us to stop reading to understand what a poem means and read for How a Poem Means, the title of a book of criticism he wrote. With meaning dead, though many readers believe meaning a vampire--leave them their good hunting, their sharpened stakes, their garlic cloves, their filigreed crucifixes, their blinding bright dawns as the coffins are opened—the rest of us believing in the finality of death will enjoy the clear imagery and neat symbols of horses and young girls dreaming and primary and basic colors of Cruz’s collection, the reds, yellows, blacks, whites, and some black mixed with yellow for gold.

The brevity of her book, the free verse, the short lines, generously leaves the reader with time, time that can be used rereading these poems. Repeating, repetition, occurs within the context and the structure, from the title of the book, Sweet Repetition, to the repeated titles of poems, Day One, Nachtstilleben, After Platonov, and Charity Balls: After John Weiners. Textually, phrases, often transformed as variations, are used over again for several poems.

So why, you might ask, did I go on about the death of meaning and vampires only to talk about repetition? I mean, that doesn’t sound like anything, after all, is dead, more like I’m afraid of vampires and avoiding them by believing they’re dead when they’re not dead. Well, the poets and the critics said that meaning is dead or something like that. But hear me out, meaning in poetry may be dead, but poetry is, to make you remember Bertolt Brecht, alive and well. One can return to a poem again and again, not for meaning, but for what a poem has to give from repeated readings, something earlier unseen or something so startling as be an object of attraction. And so it is with the difficult, little known poets Cruz mentions, John Weiners and Andrey Platonov--read Michael Hofmann’s article, Novels without Food, in the June 12, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books, about one reader’s inability to understand any of Andrey Platonov’s meaningless writing. Books without meaning so engaging one keeps returning to them. Freud wrote about repetition and dreams. Within her poems Cruz, not the first poet to do so, references Freud. All of this here, the difficult that emerges with repeated readings. In philosophical articles, Cruz has addressed repetition as habitual.

Having stumbled on the difficult, can one ever return to the first reading when, say, these poems were a quick and fun read? Which they are. Why would anyone ever want to leave that place? Read, enjoy, and move on to the next book, leave the difficult to others. They will find work plenty in Cruz’s poetry.

Thank you to NetGalley and The University of Chicago Press for an ARC

for people who love psychoanalyzing themselves and others

ˋ° *⁀➷ Rating: 3.5/5 ✰

I'll admit, I'm mostly just a casual poetry enjoyer, but this caught my interesting immediately on NetGalley with the descriptions of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and philosophy. I thought the topics covered would be a bit more "broad" (not sure what word to use here exactly), but this feels like an intimate deep-dive into the author's subconscious; this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just made the text more difficult to connect with for me since the poems could be pretty hit or miss (even more so than is usual for poetry).

Basically, this isn't for everyone, but for anyone who'd be interested in the themes it's probably really fascinating.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own and not sponsored in any way.