Nice one! Thru this Fence, another link in the collaborative chain of 3-word poems. Like the pressure built in this too.
And, Lemon Hound’s series of people talking on reviewing has another entry, this one by rob mclennan who talks about getting into the context of the writer rather than stay in the shoes of the reviewer:
rm: I work very hard to understand a book on its own terms first, before moving out into the world. What is happening? Why does this book exist? What is it adding to the madness of books that already exist?
[…] I’m tired of seeing opinion pieces, of seeing book reviews that slag a title simply because the reviewer is using the work as politic, writing a polemic. I’m tired of watching a reviewer hate a work because it’s not part of what they like; who cares? So much reviewing feels like “I love clowns, Schindler’s List didn’t have clowns in it, therefore I hated the film Schindler’s List.”
I like reviews that seek to figure out the writing, be informed enough to know what the person wrote before and how it relates so they have a better vantage point for someone new to the name. There are hundreds of thousands of English poets. Someone who is reviewing should have more of a low-down on what we’re looking at than schlo-blow who can only orient to how he or she feels off the cuff.