Let’s recall the last book, the 4rth in his series Winters of Summer. In it Michael has a character get an advanced copy of Cult of Two who makes some valid critiques of poetry (particularly Michael Faudet’s style of poetry) and his character in the book hand waves it away as “that’s a bit harsh, some of its pretty damn good and it is wildly popular”. The critique character responds “Yes, I Guess I hate reading”. Needless to say, the fourth book was his worst book up to that point, and it left me expecting not to life this book either.
This book continues the tradition of poetry being a series of sentences. You might call it a paragraph, yes, but they are more like social media snippets. Paragraphs tend to group around a central idea and go somewhere when put in a series. Here is an example “poem”:
You and Me
You once told me that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for finding love.
It’s hard to say that anything isn’t poetry. This is just a blunt set of sentences, like what you’d read on social media with “anonymous” written underneath. Its like a two sentences of a character reflecting from a good novel. This mad up a little under half of the written word in this book.
This one had more sexual poems driving toward the idea of love making- something I always thought was the central idea behind the books- then the fourth one. As well as generic falling in love. You might consider this one as a gift to a lover over the fourth one. The fourth one can be safely skipped, trust me on this one. This one had at least one poem I wanted to take a phone photo and to share with someone with legitimate appreciation to its message in the moment. This book had that feeling less then the first 3, with the first book probably being the best of the 5 up to this point.
It gets lightly political – “poetry can’t cast a vote”. Yeesh. It lightly has commentary of social media, listing disasters and then saying “don’t worry Instagram’s back up”.
