I've got some admittedly mixed feelings about this collection. On one hand, there are some gorgeous dark poems that made me glad to have picked up the collection, and when I first started reading the collection, I couldn't put it down, I enjoyed the work so much. As the collection kept unfolding, however, a few things became clear. First, there are definitely some poems here which don't hold their own weight, and while you could argue they belong in the collection thematically, it also doesn't feel as if they contribute anything not already offered by plenty of other poems in the collection, so losing those more dead-weight poems would have made for a stronger collection. Second, this is such a tightly themed collection, the images and ideas get repetitive, and I fear there's no other way to say it. If this had been a chapbook-length collection featuring perhaps a third of the poems here, chosen from among the best, I'd be in love with this work and shouting its praise to anyone who'd listen. As is, though...even though I could recognize the power in some of the images and language when it came to poems from around the mid-point on, a lot of the power was lost because they were striking the exact same notes and meanings as earlier poems.

I'm not sure I've ever appreciated poems by an author in a way that left me not so keen to check out their future full collections, but more interested in seeing what they'd have pop up in batches of 1-3 poems in journals, but that's how I feel here. I wish this collection had been pared down so that the whole would have had more impact, without the repetition that does get monotonous, or that some of these poems had been changed out for others which might have offered more breadth to the collection.

There are some gems here, but in terms of the collection as a whole, things felt a bit repetitive and unfinished, with a lot of the weaker poems being so simple and repetitive in meaning that they might as well have been a stanza taken from others. ( )