Modern Life Book

Overall, this book fluctuated between two stars and three and one half stars for me.

One more pro: a few of the poems at the end made me envision rather quirkily charming Amelie-esque scenes.

One more con: What kind of a poem is this?

YOU HAVE MY EYES

Give them back.

(And that's the entire poem. Seriously, what the heck is that? It's silly, stupid, and annoying.)

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I am still not quite finshed with this book, but after reading more of it, I have changed my rating from 2 stars up to 3 stars and have a few more thoughts on the matter:

My feelings about the content of this book fluctuate a lot as I read along, but they're little fluctuations not extreme fluctations. They're more like indecision than mood swings. (And obviously, I do understand that many of my feelings are rooted in aesthetic subjectivity and personal bias.)

At times, I find it rather quirkily charming.

At other times, I find it rather flatly clever.

Like a quirky crossword puzzle.

And I don't really like crossword puzzles--not even quirky ones--in my mind, crossword puzzles exist in a completely different realm than poetry.

One very good aspect to this book is that it tends to be very specifically imaginative--and so even if some of the particular imaginings fall flat for me personally, I have to give it credit for not being generic.

Overall, it is still falling a little more on the miss side rather than the hit side for me personally, but it's at the very least a semi-interesting read and seems to be kind of growing on me, so maybe I should give it another chance and read it again after I finish reading it for the first time.

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Only 2 stars so far, although I feel moderately optimisitic that my review may improve as I read more, but here's the thing:

I'm currently in the midst of reading her sequence of poems 'The Future of Terror' and I don't understand why she is working through the alphabet chronologically within each of these poems.

Each of these poems starts with multiple words that begin with the letter 'g' and ends with multiple words that begin with the letter 's' and in between are multiple words that start with the other alphabetically chornological letters--and why?

Mind you, I am certainly not anti-experimental when it comes to poetry, but I guess I would like the experiment to mean something or do something or...something.

But this particular experiment does not convey anything to me except that I can't help but to be overly aware of it while reading these poems, which distracts me from other details of the poems and makes me feel as if I'm reading the published results of some sort of annoying writing excercise (i.e. I could understand self-conducting some sort of writing excercise in which ones forces herself to use a bunch of g words and then a bunch of h words and then a bunch of i words etc..., in order to possibly generate some unexpected and potentially interesting results, but I don't necessarily want to read the results of that excercise with the words still in order). Maybe I'm missing something.

I remember having some similar reactions to some of the techniques used in Harvey's first collection--techniques that seemed experimental for experiment's sake, but without achieving much greater effect (which just serves to make the experiment seem relatively pointless to me).

But then I quite liked much of her second collection.

So I'm hoping once I get past this 'The Future of Terror' sequence, I will encounter something that strikes me as more impressive and/or resonant, but we shall see.

So far it's distracting and eh.