Milk and Honey / Rupi Kaur / 204 pgs

Milk and Honey is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, the author grapples with her abuse as a child and teenager. In the second, she falls in love with a man. In the third, she deals with the break up of that relationship. In the last chapter, she learns to love herself.

I have problems with modern poetry, and this is not much of an exception, despite Milk and Honey's critical and commercial success. Though I did find the first chapter moving, when the author talks about her physical and emotional abuse, that is as much praise that I can muster. I read this book for one of the categories of the Read Harder challenge, to read a collection of poetry published since 2014.

I will just crawl back to my Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Ruyard Kipling now and be happy with them.

The Fix / Lisa Wells / 70 pages

The Fix is a collection of poetry from Lisa Wells, which won the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize. I have a mixed relationship with poetry. I love to read it out loud and savor the rhythms and patterns of words, and I subscribe to the theory that poetry can have a thousand different meanings depending primarily on the reader. This also means that I sometimes miss the "real meaning" of a poem without the background context. However, I've been trying to read more of it this year and to explore some new-to-me authors.

Unrelated to my relationship to poetry, Wells's word choice throughout her poems is casual, but her style is abstract. This makes understanding her poems a bit difficult, and I sometimes had trouble following a train of thought from one stanza to another. Overall, her poetry left me with a raw enjoyment of the art but a loss on conclusions about each poem and what she might be trying to convey.

I Could Pee on This And Other Poems by Cats / Francesco Marciuliano / 112 pgs

A librarian at another branch told me about this book and I think it's the funniest thing I've read in a long time! As a cat owner, I can very well identify with the numerous short poems featured within the pages of this little book. My favorite goes like this:

tiny boxes

tiny boxes, play and hide
tiny boxes, squeeze inside
tiny boxes, cozy here
tiny boxes, paw in ear
tiny boxes
stuck, STUCK, STUCK!!!
tiny boxes, little help?

The Poets' Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family / John Lithgow / 280 pgs

I'm not much of a poetry lover. There is a sparse few poets that I like (Shakespeare's sonnets, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allan Poe) but I am so glad I read this book. It introduced me to names I had only heard before, but did not really know. Mr. Lithgow provides a great introduction and short biography on each poet he profiles. All forms of poetry was represented in this book, including the nonsense poetry I forgot that I loved (Lewis Carroll, limericks), the pretty romantic poetry of Byron and Shelley, and some of the more modern stuff that I could do without.

I was surprised to find that Mr. Lithgow was such a poetry lover and I'm thankful he did such a good job picking out poetry examples from such a wide range of poets. I feel a hundred times smarter just for reading it. Most Highly Recommended , especially to those, like me, who could stand to be educated on poetry.

I Could Chew On This: and other poems by dogs/Francesco Marciuliano /110 pgs.

The title says it all: these are short poems written as if by dogs. In most cases, there are also accompanying pictures. The book has the feel of a Hallmark gift book--as a matter of fact, I plan on buying a couple as gifts! It's really a sweet book, and dog fans will really enjoy it.

T.S. Eliot reads / T.S. Eliot 160 p.

T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, lived there for the first 18 years of his life. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He lived 1888-1965. His poems reflect his living through two World Wars. He used his extensive vocabulary and his detailed look at life to crafted poems were very descriptive. While he used the common speech, he packed poems with meaning. He wrote about what interested him. The poems could be very heavy and dark, as when he wrote about death. Yet his poems were interested to read, like The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. He would flip from writing almost commentaries about life to cats, as in Macavity: the Mystery Cat. which contributed too Lloyd-Webber's Cats.