To start off, the title is somewhat arbitrary as it is inspired by her Instagram handle and not the poems themselves. The phenomenon and emotions she ties to the color are introduced before the Contents and end with the phrase: I am Red. Are we supposed to read the poems that follow from Red’s point of view?

Unfortunately, most of the poems are filled with simple messages that we can find in holiday cards or have heard countless times. Add to this the loose composition or overall abstractness of what is being said, leading the reader feeling on the whole unaffected. It appears to me poets pick a topic, then write the first things that come to mind, cutting lines into cliche messages. “Recipe for Life” is a quintessential example. Never do poems like these feel derived from a notable experience, but from recurring thoughts that make up the daily chatter that fills our minds.

A poem titled “Complexities of Human Existence” has its work cut out for itself. All we receive is different action verbs. Four of the lines in this poem contain synonyms, and the last “changing, developing, becoming” is the most redundant. Such a wide topic in so little space requires the technical concentration and philosophical depth of a haiku.

“Game Over” has the most passionate lines in the collection, and “Isolation” contains a bit of “trauma-dumping”. Such poems are so common these days as to be over-sentimentalized.

“Hate vs Love” is the strongest poem in the collection. It could leave deeper impressions on the reader if figures were involved. Instead we have the abstract emotions itself. I enjoyed the repeating “p” sound in “powerful punch poisoning” as an attempt to replicate that ongoing bruised feeling when hateful words hit our heart. And following this, “wasting weighty words” is an excellent way to display exhaustion, as the mouth quickly gets tired of forming the “w” sound. Another favorite line of mine is “History is buried deep within me” in “The Vault”.

Some of these poems could have been combined and made stronger, such as "Awakening" and "Sunrise"; refined for a stronger impression, such as "After William"; or cut out entirely, as the theme had been explored in a different poem within the same collection, such as "No Surrender".