1 out of 4 stars
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Human Nature The Sterling The Fallacious The Hideous by Salvador DeLaRosa is a collection of poems meditating upon the corrupt nature of humanity. It is a cry in the dark, a remorseful lament on how our species never learns from its mistakes and instead chooses to be evil. He suggests that by cultivating virtues, humanity can become truly beautiful. These poems include numerous critiques of the capitalistic economy, the upper class, greed, power, modern immorality, and the worldwide disrespect for nature.
It was evident that the poet was very opinionated and had taken a lot of time to research, ruminate on, and compile his viewpoints thoroughly. His intent seemed to be extremely clear, and his poems were forceful in their urgency for change. However, that is where my praise for this book ends. While the poet may have had a coherent idea of what it was that he wanted to share, he forgot that other people were not privy to the vision in the mystic’s crystal (or shall I say, cryptic) ball. With every new page that I read, I became steadily more confused about what the poems were trying to communicate. I felt like I was missing out on a lot of crucial subtext, but didn’t know where to look to find it. At every turn, it was as if the reader had to scramble to build a model of Salvador DeLaRosa’s mind to figure out how the poet might have ended up there. One example is:
Afterwards, it struck me that the author had probably merged the words “yes” and “no” together to make “yeno.” The text was rife with sentences like these, with only very little context given for what they might mean. This made reading the text very frustrating. The only real bit of context that was provided for the reader to decrypt the poems were two articles interspersed between the other pieces, covering the topics of DARPA and magic mushrooms. I found these articles useful to build context around the two poems they were related to, and I wish that there had been more of these articles in order to have the tools to decipher the many other poems in this collection.Broken promises are not lies, they are a mere
misunderstanding, expecting the hybrid word yeno to be
added to the dictionary resolving the confusion
The style of the poetry was also obscure, ostentatious, and tedious. The poems read like the poet sat down with a thesaurus and changed every word of each piece to its most pompous counterpart. Consider the following example:
The sentence is protracted and heavy, using a lot of dense words. The metaphorical image it created in my mind was that of a few bricks that someone had laid out in order to make a wall. Unfortunately, that person had forgotten to lay out the mortar that brought them all together. Each word was its own brick, heavy and dense with meaning–but it didn’t belong to the wall, and it wasn’t connected to the other bricks. I had to pause at each word, digest its individual meaning, and consciously try to see how it all finally fit together with the rest of the sentence.A human balancing the scale of virtues at it’s epicenter is
a rare breed indeed, a single unitary valorous action and a
warranted entitlement to Knighthood and titled a munificent
being is assured to proceed
Had he written about his subjective experiences, emotions, and thoughts I may have understood and more readily appreciated his style of poetry. In a case like that, his poetry could have been focussed on getting a specific idea or feeling out of himself in its “pure form,” which would make this collection an expressive art piece (potentially excusing the lack of decipherability). However, the meat of his poems were solid opinions that he seemed to want to communicate to the audience. He dissected society and morality in an almost clinical manner, coming to very unambiguous conclusions. If his intent was to inform the reader clearly of his ideas, he did not succeed. It felt as if the poet had not written with an audience in mind and the reader was simply an afterthought.
One thing that irked me was that the poetry was not self-aware or vulnerable, both of which I believe are two crucial factors that distinguish poetry from prose. These poems did not welcome the reader in, nor did it feel like the reader was sharing an experience with the poet. The poetry did not act as a mirror to the world of human flaws–done by gently guiding the reader to face his or her own dark reflection through the poet’s own inner treasures, wounds, or vulnerability. Instead, the poetry pushed the reader away, assuming an inherently exalted viewpoint and dismissing the reader as not being as “virtuous” or as “aware” as the poet. It was poetry that was the exact opposite of self-aware and vulnerable–it was moralistic and condemning. More troublingly, it seemed like it was unaware that it was being moralistic and condemning.
This collection could also use some editing, as I found more than ten instances of grammatical mistakes relating to punctuation and incorrect word usage. It is for these reasons that I rate this collection of poems 1 out of 4 stars. I would personally be very discerning about who I recommend Human Nature The Sterling The Fallacious The Hideous to. However, if I had to suggest some general demographics that might be interested in this collection, I would say it would be readers who have an interest in dissecting human society or those who want to validate their feelings of indignation about the ruling classes.
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Human Nature The Sterling The Fallacious The Hideous
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With the examples you gave, I agree. Poetry should flow naturally, not be forced.
