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Elisabeth Horan – Self-Portrait | Review

Title: Self-Portrait

Author: Elisabeth Horan

Type: Poetry

Page Count: 148

Rating: 3.75/5

Disclaimer: I received this book for review.

I’ve read a little Elisabeth Horan before, and I’ve quite enjoyed her gritty take on poetry so far. She writes with an honesty that comes from the heart, even in this book which I suppose is almost like the poetic equivalent of a novel, or perhaps even a biography.

That’s because the entire collection is essentially themed around Frida Kahlo, and in fact quite a lot of it is partially written in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, which made it occasionally difficult to read, but Horan did at least translate it for me.

All in all, a recommended read if you’re a fan of either Frida Kahlo or contemporary feminist poetry with a subtle undercurrent of rage. What more could you ask for from it?

Learn more about Self-Portrait.

Rupi Kaur – The Sun and Her Flowers | Review

Title: The Sun and Her Flowers

Author: Rupi Kaur

Type: Poetry

Page Count/Review Word Count: 256

Rating 3.5/5

I honestly wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book anywhere near as much as I did. Kaur gets a bad rep for being an “Instagram poet” and because the content of basically all of her stuff is about relationships and feminism, but I don’t see how either of those are inherently bad things.

True, I didn’t much like the illustrations and I did start to flag with it towards the end, but I think that’s only natural when you’re reading so much poetry on the same theme. On the other hand, I really like it when poets build up a picture with just a few words, and I think Kaur is pretty good at that. In that respect, her work actually reminds me a little bit of a sort of feminist Charles Bukowski, which is almost ironic. I suspect they’d both take umbrage at that comparison.

All in all then, I was pleasantly surprised by this, and while it’s far from my favourite poetry collection, it was a lot better than I thought it was going to be and to be honest, above average when compared to pretty much all of the poetry I’ve ever been sent for review for my book blog. The difference is that I sought this one out, or at the very least I picked it up from a charity shop because I saw it. Yeah.