Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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Pleasant and occasionally moving free verse with conceptual illustrations.

As a preliminary aside, I'm not fond of poetry in its modern incarnation (entirely devoid of metrical effects, rhythm, or rhyme), but that's where verse is right now and that can hardly be lain at the author's feet. And, in fairness, reading her bio, she came to poetry through the live performance scene, so there may be some hidden rhythms in here that formed part of her stage show, but that can't be recovered from the text (that has certainly been the case for other slam poets I've read, e.g. Saul Williams).

Setting aside my grumpy old man complaints about the form, the substance is nice enough. The line drawings are evocative and complement the verse wonderfully, their interplay occasionally giving me flashes of William Blake. There are a few well-turned phrases, and a handful of really affecting passages that brought tears to my eyes. The author also has a unique perspective that I enjoyed immensely when it was fully on display, but which I wish she had shown more of.

Which brings me to the rub--the author has a tendency to retreat into platitudes, and the material regularly wanders over into the precious or trite (especially in the final section). On the whole, I'm not sure I would recommend this to anyone not already engaged with this particular genre of verse. But I should note that the market has spoken: this book of poetry was a NYT #1 best seller in 2017(!), which is an incredible feat given written verse's long slide into cultural irrelevance. So I fully recognize that I'm the one who is out of touch with the zeitgeist here, but as Sir Thomas Wyatt said, so prettily, lo those centuries ago: