Book Review NUMBER one

For my first book review I prowled the literature section of our familiar ODY Library to see what I would happen upon. After leafing through many thin volumes of poetry by various authors I happened upon a couple that I liked, but was most drawn in by a book entitled "How We Sleep on the Nights We Don't Make Love" by E. Ethelbert Miller. The first thing I noticed about this book and author, is that the author doesn't seem to want to make it known whether he/she is a male or female, and because they don't want that to seem apparent I decided to not look it up.

The poems build up as the book goes on in a strange manner. Many poems are addressing the subject of love or the subject of politics, or what happens when the two collide, which they so often do. And the love is not for one particular person; this is known because under the titles of several of the poems in parenthesis it reads (for [insert name here])—it is almost always a new name. The poems have a very conversational feel, which we might find familiar in the New York style poets we just read about, however the tone is softer. A lot of the poems are directed to an unknown “you”. The poems are loosely connected, with some clumped together that are very similar and then others that don’t seem to have as much of a connection, as though this is an early publication of works that are compiled together with some meaning, but not completely thought over. Because of this the poems are never predictable, and at points I was surprised by the content that would arise in the next poem. Many of the poems are written in the perspective of different people, or maybe it is all from the author’s personal perspective—either way would be plausible. All of the poems are written in a free form manner, which is refreshing every time. The vocabulary is “anglo-saxon”, not too much overly complex or flowery language is used. And at the end… well the book does seem to just end, with no over-arching striving to get some message across or anything like that. The book seems to just be continued jumbles of the author’s views on matters and what the author would perceive to be other’s views on matters of importance, but not of grave importance, there is no sense of urgency in the writing. And the book itself is a paper back, 73 pages, and slightly plain but appealing. Something I would definitely recommend picking up, but I did not find in the poetry anywhere a place that stopped me and made me feel as if I wished I had written the words I had just read myself.