2 out of 4 stars
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Like Playing with Lost Words, by L.J. Valente, is a series of short poems. According to the prologue, almost all of the poems included in this book were written at a bar in a pizzeria in South Carolina. This pizzeria was a place where Valente returned to writing as a way to transition back to living in the United States after many years living in Turkey. The pizzeria became a place of acceptance, a home, for Valente, which allowed the poems written there to truly reflect the emotions that Valente had to work through during this difficult transition from one life to another.
All of these poems have a connection to working through life. Knowing that the author was working through a transition in life at the time these poems were written, it is clear that Valente broke apart all of the difficulties of life and worked them out through these poems. Rather than trying to work through life’s challenges as one giant puzzle, each of these poems focuses on one small factor. Not only does this make it easier to process each of the poems, but it makes them more relatable to a wider audience because, even if a given reader has not experienced life events that connect with each and every one of the poems in this collection, that reader will find a handful of poems that they are able to relate to.
These poems are all extremely short, and though they are all connected in that they all pertain to working through life’s challenges, these poems are best if they are not read back-to-back in one sitting; these poems are best suited for one-at-a-time reading followed by some time to ponder on what each poem relays to the reader. I think this collection’s best target audience would be young adults and older, for anyone who is going through a transitional phase of life and is looking for poetry to meditate with in order to help the reader process these transitions.
Unfortunately, some of these poems were not well edited. Almost all of the errors I found seemed to be typos, such as one line that reads, “while the questions still remains” rather than “while the question still remains,” or, “while the questions still remain,” though a couple of the errors were misuse of words. Both of these types of errors could have been fixed with more thorough editing, and I found that they did detract from the overall quality of this collection of poems, mainly for the reason that because these poems are so short, the errors are very noticeable and do change the flow of the poems.
I rate this book 2 out of 4 stars. I would have liked to give it 3 out of 4 but the errors make some of the poems less impactful than they could be. That being said, I think that this is a wonderful collection of poems that any reader would be able to connect to, even if they can only relate to a couple of poems.
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Like Playing With Lost Words
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