This week's review compares two poetry books. The first is Love Her Wild by Atticus, and the second is Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments by Tony Trigilio. Read on to discover which may appeal to you!
Looking for something light to read this summer? Try some poems! In Love Her Wild, mysterious instagram poet Atticus collects some of his most evocative writings. These short, lyric observations capture the beauty and adventure in life from the delight in wild places to the irrepressible energy of young love. Read about moonlit nights in the desert and love that tears poems from your flesh alongside stark black and white photographs of the world he so lovingly describes. Love Her Wild is the perfect book to bring along on a picnic or to the beach.
Or, if love and beauty aren’t your cup of tea, Elise Cowen has an extended metaphor about corpses that might speak to you. Following her suicide in 1962, nearly all of Cowen’s work was burned for their unsettling exploration of sex, drugs, and mental illness. In Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, Tony Trigilio collects and comments on the sole surviving notebook of the legendary beat poetess, best known for dating Alan Ginsberg. In this glimpse into the mind of one of the most prolific writers you’ve never read, Cowen questions the source of her madness, the social mores of her time, and the role of women through a proto-second-wave-feminist lens. Read about cockroaches and pot shards and the charmlessness of love. This book is can’t-miss for any fan of the beat generation, or anyone curious to see how poems evolve from draft to finished form.
Or, if love and beauty aren’t your cup of tea, Elise Cowen has an extended metaphor about corpses that might speak to you. Following her suicide in 1962, nearly all of Cowen’s work was burned for their unsettling exploration of sex, drugs, and mental illness. In Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments, Tony Trigilio collects and comments on the sole surviving notebook of the legendary beat poetess, best known for dating Alan Ginsberg. In this glimpse into the mind of one of the most prolific writers you’ve never read, Cowen questions the source of her madness, the social mores of her time, and the role of women through a proto-second-wave-feminist lens. Read about cockroaches and pot shards and the charmlessness of love. This book is can’t-miss for any fan of the beat generation, or anyone curious to see how poems evolve from draft to finished form.
- Leah
