Title: The Unmapped Woman
Author: Abegail Morley
Type: Poetry
Page Count: 72
Rating: 3.75/5
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this for review.
I met Abegail on a press trip to learn about Latvian literature, which seems appropriate as it’s ripe with poets. Morley writes about motherhood and stuff, and it’s good! Not my usual stuff but it was beautifully written and food for thought.
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.
