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Worth reading 😎
A long collection full of an outpouring of emotion and experience, freely formed with some true moments of clarity and power
This is a cleansing. Of that, we choose to say or won’t say. The anxieties, the depressions, and all the breakdowns between. They have found a place in you and in me while manifesting themselves in ways unseen. In the awareness comes the healing. Finding the peace that declutter brings. Let us gather together and take a look at all that we have amassed. Let us all take a look at our THINGS.
Jennifer Nuesi's Things has a simple title that belies the strength of emotion that is contained in this collection of poems. Passion, anger, anxiety, pain - all of these feelings are explored here and ripped raw in Nuesi's examination.
As would be expected, self-examination by the poet is key to the content of Things. There is a sense of a sorting through the detritus that is left after a relationship ends and reflection on how this made the poet feel. I think for anyone who has been hurt through love (or something pretending to be love) or who has been in a relationship which is unbalanced, whether through one person being dominant or with passion verging on the physically or emotionally destructive, there is much to be found in these poems to assist, to guide, to fortify.
The feeling that I generated from my reading is that Things as a title is an understatement; a generic term applied to important and life-altering emotional experiences and contemplations that Nuesi feels compelled to explore. This may be out of modesty or perhaps, a want to draw attention to them but not to promote them; it feels like these are important but the poet is hesitant to declare this importance too boldly. Whatever the reason for such an unassuming title, this collection has moments of power where I really connected with the poems. Some favourites that are difficult to cite as there are no titles were ones with the first lines "sonnets waver", "delicious devilry", "like stretching forms...", "He fiends for me nightly", "The tongue twists in wicked ways", "Midnight faces" and "Times change" to name a handful.
However, I did feel like the collection was too long. There is merit in all of the verses to some degree but there were times where I felt like the emotions in some of them had already been expressed, an image already used and that old ground was being re-covered. This may have been the intention, like waves of emotion. Some poems resonated more than others with the succinctness of language and the pinpointing of sentiment, making them feel "tighter" in what they were trying to express. Lack of punctuation, perhaps used to make the poems have fluidity and a stream-of-consciousness effect, meant that, for me, nuance of meaning was less obvious but may augment the experience for other readers who enjoy the looser form.
Reviewed by
It's not easy to sum up who I am, enough to make me interesting anyway, so what's essential to know? I love to read. I love to review. I love to write and blog at scuffedgranny.com. Short stories and poems are my main writing successes, winning runner-up plaudits on Reedsy Prompts and Vocal.media.
Synopsis
This is a cleansing. Of that, we choose to say or won’t say. The anxieties, the depressions, and all the breakdowns between. They have found a place in you and in me while manifesting themselves in ways unseen. In the awareness comes the healing. Finding the peace that declutter brings. Let us gather together and take a look at all that we have amassed. Let us all take a look at our THINGS.
About the author
My writing is of echoes. Words that float about a cave filled with disproportioned anxieties, reluctant to sit on a foundation of logic but rather a frame of my doing. These ideas and thoughts swim around in my head and I let them out by applying a pen to a paper. view profile
Published on December 22, 2021
30000 words
Contains mild explicit content ⚠️
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by
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