I’ve always struggled knowing where to put my poetry reviews. I had them over on my personal website http://jessedictor.com/ as well as here in the past. While I mostly wanted to keep the poetry side of myself separate from the art side because they don’t sell well enough, the truth is even when paying people its been so hard to get content for the magazine that I feel like I basically have to carve in the poetry section here. I can’t have such a large part of my content creation of poetry be separated from the magazine.
Anyway, onto…
Suck Summer Sweet
by Jasmine Christi
Poetry books are famous for their opening dedications to one name mystery people. I think it stems from knowing it won’t be a large release, and as a way to tell the people they care about directly they care about them. As a reader we are left with just an empty dedication page to people we don’t know and probably will never know or care about. Suck Summer Sweet participates in this tradition- and also dedicates it to “piss vodka”.
This is a nice break from the typical poetry book but also starts setting the expectation of what type of book this will be. A drunk sad poet.
The story of her book seems to have two different phases she jumps through at random, one where she is in an unhappy relationship but is scared the man will leave, the other as a girl who is looking to hook up on tinder. While these two types of phases are very clear, the order they are in the book are at random, so you are unsure if she left the unhappy relationship and went to tinder, or she was on tinder and found her unhappy relationship. I suspect many women will relate to her being bored with hearing about bullets, sports, and war.
One thing I noticed is that all the written pages were on the right side. The left side of the pages were almost entirely blank. I messaged her about this online curious for why and she let me know “she only liked reading the right sides of books”. This is cute and quirky, but when I tried to share the book with a paramour she was rather upset because she felt like it was a waste of paper. Something to keep in mind if you are considering this as a gift. I thought at first the reason she did this might have been because she was treating the book like her bed- in her unhappy relationship. The right side of the bed was hers.
The whole book is less then a ten minute read, I was challenged by my paramour to count up her word count and compare it to the length of this article (she thought it would be funny if my review of the book was in fact longer than the book itself). I didn’t end up doing a word count- its a silly plan anyway. It takes so much longer to read and digest each poem, that this article would be a breeze to read through. The book is a good gift for a female friend in a failing relationship who isn’t really that into poetry. It is very easy to vibe with a poem read at random but as a piece you read through to analyze its not quite there. She does seem like the kind of girl who would be fun to go on a date with though.
