I’m back with another book review, and this time, to celebrate 100 Followers on WordPress, it’s a double book review of “The Sun and Her Flowers” by Rupi Kaur, and “Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short and Sexy Love Poems, Vol. 1,″ a collection edited by Amanda Oaks and Caitlyn Siehl! I’ll be reviewing these both individually like I did with Michael Faudet and Lang Leav’s poetry.
Just before we get to reviewing both of these collections, I want to say thank you for following! I’m incredibly surprised that I reached 100 followers on this platform only three days ago, and I am so glad that all of you enjoy reading my book reviews and analyses on this blog! Now, onto reviewing!
“The Sun and Her Flowers”
The main complaint I have is that I wish there had been a written warning, beforehand, that a good portion of the poetry in this book, contained explicit mention of sexual assault and rape, especially for the first quarter of the collection. I definitely did not expect that, going into reading this book of poetry, and I was quite shocked, for lack of better words (and not in a good way). Despite what the cover and title may suggest, this is not a poetry book you want to read in public. Even when there are poems that are safe, many other poems are of a not-safe-for-work (NSFW) nature due to talking about sex and other topics not suited for young children. However, despite that, the imagery of the poetry, including the ones dealing with or discussing sexual assault and rape, is interesting, even if it is that graphic.
Rupi Kaur’s graphic description reminds me much of Faudet’s own poetic descriptions of sex, mainly because they’re so explicit and blatant. It makes me wonder if there’s a trend going on regarding having explicit imagery in poetry as of late. Alas, I am not a poetry expert and so I cannot say if that is for sure. Sometimes Kaur’s explicit imagery is quite effective, but sometimes it comes off as too much at once to handle, and this applies to not just the sexual assault and rape poems, but also other poems’ depiction of various subjects not limited to sex, etc.
The lack of punctuation in her poems is sometimes effective in her poems, but this happened for majority of the collection, reducing the tone of some poems to be not as effective as I hoped they would be.
Overall, I’m rating this collection 3 out of 5 stars.
This is partially because of the lack of beforehand warning as well as the graphic description and lack of punctuation being double-edged swords.
“Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short and Sexy Love Poems, Vol. 1″
It may be obvious enough in the title, but just in case: No, don’t bring this out to read in public unless you want people raising eyebrows at you. It’s clearly NSFW, and it’s fair to say the vast majority of them are quite sexual in nature, which is a given regarding how the poems are called ‘literary sexts’ in the title.
All of the ‘sexts’ are poetic one-liners, which makes all of them short, sweet and to the point like Lang Leav’s style. The imagery in quite a few of these one-liners are quite innovative and I was actually quite impressed by them. One of my favourites was this one:
“Daydreaming of running my fingers down your spine as if you were my favorite book. I want torn pages and I want smudged words.” —Darcy Vines
Also, this one:
“My lips are the breeze pouring in through the open window, brushing off dust to lick the light floating through your chapel carved in the mountain mouth.” —J. August
Do I think this collection was too short to pay the full price? Yes, especially since they were all one-liners. I would have loved to read another page or two of these, at least, and the collection overall left me wanting more of it. However, I do hear that there’s a Volume 2 of this, and perhaps I will get it in the future and see how it does compared to this one…
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