Devin

Everything that I love about modern poetry, done with an elegant and mad skillfulness. Honestly, I have a hard time describing poetry I like. Usually just end up saying “go read it.”

go read it.

God this book is fascinating and beautiful, and there is more than one scene that turned my stomach or put my jaw on the floor. It has its own atmosphere and ambience that is so unique to just this book, that I can't think of anything to which I can compare it. Even if I could, I wouldn't want to. If it helps any, the first time I heard of this book was when I went to google and searched for “books that feel like the Silent Hill series.”

It is tempting to look at evil people in the world and label them as monsters. From Adolf Hitler to Ted Bundy, we give them names and adjectives (inhuman, animal, insane) to distance them from ourselves. But they were all human, and the capacity for evil like theirs exists in all of us. All it requires is that we give into our selfishness, and refuse to take responsibility for our actions. This book is a horrifying reminder of that, and it forces us to take the point of view of a truly repulsive human to teach us this lesson.

P.S. I despise every cover to this book I have ever seen. It always makes it look like an erotic novel, and this book is the farthest thing from erotic.

This book broke my heart, though more for Charlotte than for Werther. I don't like the idea of Werther as a tragic hero, but his “voice” is absolutely gorgeous, and the book itself is short enough that I didn't feel overwhelmed by Werther's point of view (and even Goethe acknowledges that Werther is “unstable”). With that in mind, the ending was so horrifying yet so well done that the cliche of comparing it to Greek tragedy is all I'm left with. I would definitely read this again if I wanted a moody/Mary Shelley vibe to my day

Though this still has the roots of modern poetry that so many find vapid and unnecessarily pretentious, there are two things that separate this book from so many best-selling (and poorly crafted) modern poetry books. First, erudition. Warren knows who and what she is referencing and why, and creates out of it a mishmash of mythology and vibes. Second, and this one feeds the first, passion. This was not something lazily churned out for money, and it shows. Even in the poems where Warren is at her most vague and abstract, she still makes sure to make the words on the page beautiful, something neglected by many poets (looking at you Atticus).
I must also admit my own bias. Between her videos and this book, Warren's example of living life with as much sacred beauty as can be found in every moment has had a lasting impact on me. It has been an aid to me as someone trying to live as a poet and a person with severe depression. Maybe I would be less partial to this book if it had not meant so much to me in the year or so since it came out. Maybe I would feel the same or even love it more.
Regardless, I want to give my honest feelings. This is not a perfect book. I know that and I think Warren does too. It is a beautiful book. It is a book that has had an effect on my soul. And that is more than enough for me.

Gorgeous, full of pain and joy and the smell of flowers and trees. George should never be forgotten. A beautiful example of queer literature from a time when that was a word full of malice, a time when this man lost his family because of who he was. I can either go on for paragraphs saying the same thing over and over, or I can stop here. Get a copy, if you are able. Any of George's work. I hope it changes your life as it has changed mine.

i'll read it again in ten years and will likely understand it better.

deliriously beautiful. cortázar speaks with a voice like the wind, and the way he flows from poetry to prose is like water flowing over stones in a river. it's beautiful, dizzying, so full of heart and joyous and lovely. read it all, and then again. good night.

It was a bizarre journey to read this directly after finishing “Man's Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. To move from a book that was ultimately so positive and hopeful into one that is so broken and pained is a sobering experience. The more one reads about the Holocaust, the more it refuses classification, organization, or any attempt to simplify or understand it. Viktor Frankl found that a person can survive anything so long as they have a meaning in their life, and spent the rest of this life spreading that message. Borowski survived, married his fiancé who had also survived, and then committed suicide three days after she gave birth to their daughter. I will not claim to know everything he was thinking and feeling at the time; I can't even begin to imagine.

This book does not revel in the horrors it presents, and that is what makes it harder to read than most books. If it dangled its horrors in your face, then it would feel exploitative, and that is something that is more familiar to people. You would have people outraged on one side, and enjoying it on the other. But these stories do not do that. By opening it, you have walked through a door into a place where you may see all the things that humans are capable of doing to each other. Most of the time, we think we have seen this before, but we're never aware of how other artists cover up the worst things, or hide them behind implication, have them happen offscreen in the movie. Borowski chooses to hide nothing. You have come into this place, you wanted to learn about this, so Borowski does the cruelest and wisest thing, and allows you to see it.

I am haunted by this book. I am also motivated to do all I can to make the world a better place, in whatever way I am able. I rarely encounter a book that I believe “everyone should read,” but this may be an exception.

it feels almost wrong to rate this book on such an arbitrary scale, especially after reading the poem “Why I Write.” i tried to stick with my usual scale. if a book is okay, i give three stars. if it's something good, four stars, and if it changed my life and i know i'll read it again and again, five.
anyway, being critical, which i try to do with these, Kindra Reiter is a good writer. Definitely look her up on instagram.

i can't. i cannot just be critical. “Island Life” was the first poem in this book to ring a bell in my heart that kept tolling. it hit something that made me cry and my eyes are still red as i write this. there are some poems in this book that are take-or-leave (oddly like Bukowski, only much less rough and gross; keeping in mind i like Bukowski, but i get people who don't), but the poems that hit, hit hard. they strike you through with sincerity and a mind like a wave that crashes and smoothes out and then crashes again. this is what poetry is meant to be, no matter the form it takes. i will always appreciate writing that is elegant, or new, or just weird, but i will remember writing that breaks my heart and puts it back together.

I think I have become spoiled by Stephen Mitchell's translation, as I've read the sonnets that he translated for “Selected Poems” and they had more of the magic that I fell in love with, as opposed to this Norton Translation. This was still beautiful, but it did not touch my heart the same way. I'll hold off on a full review until I do some more reading

Reading this felt like remembering the beginning of time. Everywhere, all over the world, all through history, you can find simple little mystical tales that make you feel connected to the earth. This is another, and it feels brand new and ancient

Eternal and wonderful. Read these poems the same way you'd look out to the horizon from the beach.

Fantastic. I think these might be my new favorite Ito stories, particularly Slumber and The Spirit Flow of Aokigahara. There's the mildly cheesy Stephen King short story feel that I've always loved and which Ito makes into his own kind of monster, and since these stories are a little longer than his other it feels like he takes the time to breathe in the vibe and go crazy with the twists of the story. Occasionally I'd find myself questioning character's actions, but it didn't affect my enjoyment of the story. Ito said in the afterword that these weren't new story ideas but ones he'd pulled from old notebooks, and I like that they didn't get a proper form until now. It feels like they aged well before being sent out into the world.

A coworker once told me “you can't find out everything about life by reading books.” He was absolutely right, but he missed something. You can't find out everything about life without reading books either. Life must be read and lived in conjunction. Kathryn Schulz has done both, and it shows. This is a wonderful story, an engaging and lovely piece of writing, and more importantly, it is wisdom. Schulz references ancient authors more than once, and the wisdom she lives and imparts through her words is the same wisdom they taught when they lived. I don't have any more words except just read it.

I wrote a long, heartfelt review. I didn't mean to because I'm doing this on my phone, but I got too excited. I was just about to write a tl/dr, when the app crashed. I'm too sleepy to try and repeat all of it from memory, so here's the tl/dr:

This book has changed my life. As a book, it's well-written, interesting, crazy, and surprisingly funny. But my main thing is that I have never felt more seen by an author in my whole life except for Rilke. I have never felt more understood. I feel myself getting carried away again so I'll stop.

Book is really good. If you don't like, that's perfectly fine, but I am a different person after reading it and it's really good.

Beautiful, wonderful, no criticisms, aaaaaaaaaa.
I know people like to tease this book by saying that it's like reading the Bible or something like that, but in my opinion that's one of its strengths. This tale is gorgeous and sweeping and it elevates your state of mind so high into the clouds that you feel like a divine being, watching these events transpire and the years roll on. Absolutely brilliant.

Hilarious, ridiculous, thoughtful, rambling, poignant, and just plain fun. It's a collection of thoughts on the world dressed up as the review of an exasperated editor trying to understand the scrambled notes of an eccentric philosopher who has been working on a “Philosophy of Clothes.” It has some genuinely insightful and beautiful things to say about the world, but it is never afraid to indulge in its own absurd mythos to keep things interesting. I'm so excited that I get to read this one again, and understand it better.

Mesmerizing, upsetting, paranoia-inducing, moving from trains of broken logic to scenes from a shattered kaleidoscope, and ending in a last-act burst of madness and clarity that rivaled the films of Gaspar Noe. When I saw the number for the final chapter, I let out a burst of air that was half-fearful laugh, half-relieved sigh. My mind has been warped and my heart rinsed clean. I am so happy I read this.

Fantastic and painful. It feels so real in a way that is scary but important. It feels like it's coming from a writer who knows what she's talking about.

This was odd. Everything that every other review mentions is true, from the constantly switching perspective, to the lack of anything happening, yadda yadda. And for the first half of this book I was constantly ready to quit reading. I was sure it was going to be a three star read if I did finish it, because the setup is interesting and the writing, while occasionally insufferable, was actually fun to read. By the time I'd hit the halfway point, I was used to the switching perspectives and the tension and fear in the characters was starting to crank up.

I think the biggest problem with this book is a lack of proper editing. The worst parts for me are the ones where someone should have told Alam: “Listen, I love this, but it is not as effective when it goes on for a paragraph rather than a couple of sentences.” I think of the moments where this happens as Alam spinning off into the air. Like yes, it would be interesting to have a character think about how his flip flops will someday be cut up by people of color in another country to be made into something new and sold to white people again. Having him think this while he is desperately searching for his daughter feels like I was running and then someone took a baseball bat with the word “Digression” burned onto it and hit me in the head.

I loved the ending, because the journey in this book is not about the apocalypse, but rather how people act when the world is falling apart and they don't know what to do. In other words, most people's daily lives right now. I did not care about learning what was going on by the last third of the book, because I was wrapped up in the characters and how they each dealt with their panic and confusion differently. I don't want to know why people's teeth started falling out or what those planes were going to do or even what was happening with the world outside. That's not the point. The point is that all we can do is keep going, no matter how bad things get. That's why I'm giving it four stars. It should not have spent so much time in digressions, especially in the beginning before the tension has even started, because that was a slog to get through. Once the tension starts, Alam has a restraint put on the wild word wanderings of his brain, and it becomes much more focused. I blazed through the last hundred pages of this and almost cried twice.

tl;dr A lot of work should have been done before this was published, but the final third was so good that it gets an extra star from me.

P.S. Reading the sex scenes in this book felt like I snuck into the pages of the Necronomicon. I'm glad I got to read it, but a part of my mind and soul has been forever damaged.

I think this may have been my third time reading this book cover to cover. Honestly, I read it in spots constantly. I carry it with me everywhere, like Linus with his blanket. Whether it gives good luck or simply makes me feel safe, I'm not sure.
Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the few people that I can say is my favorite artist. You will never get my favorite movie, or book, or painting, or song, because they change constantly and I am never able to think of any single one as more meaningful than another. I love them all.
But Rilke holds this special place as my “favorite” poet. In the words of Marina Tsvetaeva, writing to Rilke on his deathbed in 1926: “You are not the poet I love most. ‘Most' already implies comparison. You are poetry itself.” I am inclined towards those sentiments. Rilke is the poet that spoke to the lost, confused, endlessly yearning child within me that was drawn towards beauty and the infinite without the slightest hint as to why. He helped me find where to step when I started down a hidden path that no one among my family or friends knew. He taught me that writing could be precisely what it wanted to be, and all that I had to do was listen. Listen and gather the world inside of myself and transform every Thing that I could carry. Do that, and perhaps there will be a few lines to show for it. Even if there aren't, life will become incredibly beautiful, and that was reason enough for me. Rilke taught me how to love myself, even though the wiring of my brain places me on the autism spectrum and has caused me more than a little trouble and alienation throughout my life. Rilke spoke to me as someone who understood, and could teach me to understand. This man's work is my life, not in the sense of obsession or possession, but in the sense that it is a part of me just as the hair on my head, or the shape of my nose.
I first read Letters to a Young Poet, over and over. That was how I found out about Rilke. When I decided I wanted to read his poetry, not just read him writing about poetry, I found this book. It changed my life, and I keep it with me wherever I go now.

If you only ever read one thousand-page, experimental, existential-crisis-inducing book, make it this one. Belongs in the same company as “Mrs. Dalloway” and “Ulysses.” I absolutely mean that. Maybe I'll come back and write a longer, more comprehensive review, but I've just finished this book and I am reeling and I just need to make sure it's clear that when I say this book is five stars, I mean every bit of it.
Okay, I'm going to go collapse in bed and feel the universe spinning around me for the rest of the night.

Keeping Up With The Karcrashians


I want to love this book a great deal more than I do. It's concept is something that arrests me completely; a look into the personal hell that a dysfunctional community of people can cause for one another. The writing is elegant and what one could expect from the time period and a skilled writer.
Yet, there is something in the execution that did not hold me. I don't know exactly what it is, but it after about sixty pages it became less of a joy and more of a routine to read. I still read it to the end because it is a good book, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys Jane Austen but was perhaps putting this one off. The relatively low rating really only reflects the fact that I will not feel a desire to read it again for a long time, if ever. I'm glad I did read it though. It's beautiful and diabolical and intense.

I still return to this one again and again. It is poetry that conveys beauty and simplicity. It instills the same feelings in me as the song “Simple and Clean” by Utada Hikaru. It is lovely and deeply human.