The fourth book of his flirtatious and simple series, this book steps away from its poetic side and has many more “short series of sentences”. They have a title, but they lack many of the indicators you are looking at a poem as oppose to an Instagram caption. His poetry and short sentences are much less romantic then his previous books, as well as less sexy.
He also gets political for the first time in his poem “Trigger Warning” where he worries about protecting the rifle over the child as well as one about arguing with people about politics on social media. A gay son listening to his father speak. More cultural relics as well- he mentions “watching Black Mirror” and clicking lego blocks. This book is the least like his first book in his series (up to this point I’ve yet to read the fifth one).
He has stories- that are maybe meant to be series of sentences- where he is the narrator. They lack the structure of his old short stories as well. In one of them he gets entirely meta and has a character complain about HIS poetry- in much the same way I would complain about his. No shit, another character retorts “that’s a bit harsh, some of its pretty damn good and it is wildly popular”.
NO SHIT THE CHARACTER RESPONDS “Yes, I Guess I hate reading”.
Now, I dunno, its painted like he’s taking a real world character and interaction and putting it in the book, but being someone who reads a lot of poetry books, it reads like he is rationalizing his own books to himself. Complaints given are valid and can’t be hand waved with being popular.
He earlier established the person he was talking to had an expensive purse and expensive tastes. I thought this was weird before the poetry section because he arely goes into this type of detail- but I realize now that I think he was making a stab at his would be critics.
He also has some of his traditional style stories in Winters of Summer but much fewer.
This really leaves me wandering… did you cheat on your wife Michael? Is this like a big “I’m sorry” text that you are selling to your audience?
This was probably his worst book of the series, losing the audience I would recommend the book and I’d say here is where you should stop giving it to a lover in hopes of getting their engine going. There is a super specific set of people who would like this but if you are that you wouldn’t care for my recommendation anyway, so I’d say not to worry about this one.
