From Amanda Lovelace, a poetry collection in four parts: the princess, the damsel, the queen, and you. The first three sections piece together the life of the author while the final section serves as a note to the reader. This moving book explores love, loss, grief, healing, empowerment, and inspiration.the princess saves herself in this one is the first book in the “women are some kind of magic” … some kind of magic” series.
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I had a lot of difficulty rating this. For one thing, I always find poetry difficult to rate for whatever reasons. For another, I think I may need to reread this before I can be really sure how I feel about it. When I first picked this up I had heard a lot of hype about Amanda Lovelace. I had seen some of her poems already and liked them. But when I first began reading this book I felt a little disappointed. The hype was huge and I found myself thinking that, while it was good, it wasn’t as good as I wanted/expected. I was about a quarter of the way through when one of the poems really hit me. I was about half when I had read a handful who took my breath away. I was three quarters of the way done when I finally found what the hype was about. So this was a slow evolution to me. The style reminds me of Cummings and Dickinson, but is still distinctive from them. Some of the poems in this book gave me a fantastic swooping sensation in my stomach and tinges in my fingertips and caused my heart to squeeze. But quite a few poems felt too short, or too much like a note for the author herself. Something she’d written down on scratch paper to come back to later and never did, and so they felt incomplete. Those I couldn’t connect with, they felt too light for me to really touch them. They may work for someone else, but they didn’t for me. So I think I’m settling on a three and a half stars rating. I did like this, and some poems I loved. I will probably pick up some of this author’s other works, because I think there’s a hell of a lot of potential here. Was I wowed the whole way through? Not really. But there’s potential.
your book really opened my eyes and helped me realize my worth! Thank you!!
couldn’t put it down. very, very deep and fulfilling. covers every aspect of the struggles of women lives. abuse, sex, drugs, suicide, and more.
A beautiful collection of poetry. It may not be the flowing epics read in college, but the emotion is just as real and raw. It tells a beautiful and haunting story that so many can relate to. I would definitely pick this up even if you aren’t into poetry. Maybe this will be your foot in the door.
While some of these poems were soul searching and personal, others were just a sentence that had no impact. The poems that were personal/emotional had a lot of impact but none of them stuck with me. I won’t be thinking of these poems years from now like I do with Poe, Dickinson, and Whitman.
This is just not my taste in poetry. I want sentence structure and punctuation, especially with the uncapitalized “I’. I want more than one sentence!!
Hitting
Enter
After
Every
Word
Does
Not
Make
good
Poetry
I had a lot in common with this collection of poems. I’m a reader who started writing poetry as a way to work through my emotions. But I don’t think you need to be a writer or even a devoted reader to be moved by this collection. Some very pretty poem art as well!
Oh. My. GOODNESS.
Poetry can be tough – it’s very personal and reactions to it can be unpredictable. It’s often full of simile and metaphor and allegory, and can be difficult to unpack. Sometimes it’s just difficult. And sometimes it’s transcendent, as in this gorgeously brutal collection by Amanda Lovelace.
In sparse, haunting, spot-on prose, Lovelace bares her life to her readers. She has a facility with language that is second to none – she manages to express a lifetime’s worth of pain and promises (both broken and fulfilled) in phrases that are shorter than my To Do list but that hit with the impact of a Mack truck. The format and layout and words meld together into an experience of a life that broke my heart and made me proud, often at the same time.
There is a spirit of defiant possibility that underlies even the harshest self- (and other-) inflicted criticisms that resonated even as it brought a lump to my throat. We may feel fragile but we have a core of steel – we just need to let it hold us up. That’s my takeaway, anyway, and I think it’s a brilliant and oh-so-timely reminder that needs to be shouted in a daily affirmation to our messed-up modern world.
The princess has most definitely saved herself in this one, and here’s hoping that her bravery and courage will help other princesses (and the occasional prince) do the same…
Out of the two books I’ve read by Amanda Lovelace, I enjoyed this one more. In my opinion, Princess is more relatable and heart rending. Ms. Lovelace has obviously been through it, and relays her experiences in a ways that evokes a feeling of kinship, rather than pity. I look forward to reading the next collection she has coming out.
Not for me.