Book Review: “A Time For Winter” by Kait Quinn

I’m back with another book review, and this time I’m reviewing the poetry collection “A Time For Winter” by Kait Quinn! It’s been a while since I read and reviewed a poetry collection. Though it’s not winter yet at this time of posting, it will be winter soon, so I figured this was an appropriate collection to read. Here’s a quick summary so we know what it’s about: “A Time for Winter takes you on one poet’s journey through her own hard seasons. Feeling the hurt and dead weight of anxiety, depression, and regret over a past long gone by going inward and pulling it all up to the surface before letting it go so that the real work can begin: stillness, self care, healing. My journey toward healing was powered by writing, yoga, therapy, rooting down into the earth, and reaching up toward the lights of our universe. I am still healing. I am learning to love and care for myself. I am planting the seeds for my blossoming. I am in the winter of my youth.”

Overall Thoughts:

I enjoyed this poetry collection more than I expected. I find that many recent poetry collections I’ve read tend to focus on themes of mental health, moving on from relationships that harmed the writer and narrator of the poem, and so on. Each collection varies widely in quality, since their poetry forms are often free verse and don’t use many (if any) traditional forms of poetry and don’t rely much on the typical poetry guidelines of line breaks, punctuation, and . However, “A Time For Winter” surprised me because it not only played with free verse, but also with some more conventional poetry techniques (rhyming, working more with meter, etc.). There were some poems I did enjoy reading quite a lot. One of them is “Either Way,” which I thought was a really interesting poem because of its work with lines. “Lunar” also stuck out to me as well. There are a few weaker poems in the collection, but that’s mainly because I think they could have been made into prose poems instead of doing the conventional strategy (and popular strategy of writing poetry these days) of just splitting up whole sentences into small lines. It’s more of a matter of how the writer structured the poems overall vs. the actual content of the poems.

Overall, I’m rating this collection 4 out of 5 stars!

It’s a very thoughtful collection, and I enjoyed the themes presented and written about. If you’re looking for some poetry for the upcoming winter season, or even to read before winter begins, I would recommend reading this one.

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