Ravished by Lydia Hack starts by breaking the mold of the one name dedications by calling them “inspirations”. Her style is full of these types of cute quirks where she is engaged with the convention but still tailored as her own.
Interestingly enough to me, she does a lot of the same “right side of the book only” poetry as Jasmine Christi’s “Sweet Summer Suck” from my last book review, which is interesting to me because its something I’ve not often seen now came up twice.
The book reads in a way that you know she is a writer and probably even reads poetry. From a presentation standpoint the shaping of the verses make them hard to read in a natural way. It makes me think that she doesn’t typically read them at poetry meetings or has learned to read through the line breaks. What it mostly feels like to me is that she has tried to shape a lot of her poetry to work well on social media. Abnormal line breaks are very common in twitter poems, and makes them more visually pleasing to share. Her long form poems are also better than her short poems. It makes me thing again that these are shaped to be for social media- and that the area she shines in as a reader and a writer are in poems that span pages.
Reading through the first half of the book I find lots of sexual undertones that I’m left unsure if she is very sexually satisfied or very sexually frustrated.
The second half shines more of her poems about being a mother. I’m not sure if they are good but I very much enjoy mothers and paints a pleasant picture of her in my mind’s eye.
Her two best poems are in the middle of the book- named “Assault” and “the Battle”. Both are about three pages long and were very enjoyable, they were like a good novel where I couldn’t wait to see where the lines were headed, building tension and suspense to a good conclusion. These poems are also a bit grim for the general twitter audience as people tend to react negatively to emotional trauma content. It would make me think Lydia Hack’s work would do well as a series of short stories and also wouldn’t make me surprised if she has a series of good short stories hidden away somewhere.
I would recommend her as a gift poetry book to your single mother artist friends who never quite found their artistic groove in the world.
