3 out of 4 stars
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“Not knowing that a promise to come get me was a tool you would use, To get my mother to postpone the court date or ignore something else you said.
You even were still trying to get her in your bed.”
What I loved the most about Waiting at the Window by Katrina D. RiChard is how outrageously beautiful her poetry is. This book is essentially a collection of poetry and prose that cover a myriad of themes, but it primarily revolves around the idea of relationships. Every woman would find herself relating to this book due to how it addresses certain universal concerns and explores the nuances of relationships.
The writer of this book is Katrina D. RiChard, a writer, educator, and theater artist. She has performed on a multitude of platforms and has also taught for the last ten years. Her work as an artist as well as a teacher inspired her to become a writer. In this work, she explores the reality of everyday life through the lens of a struggling woman. This book reads like a set of confessional poems and prose, and each work has a different story to tell.
One of the most interesting things about this book is how it is thematically coherent. There is a kind of unity in all the pieces within this work, and each piece connects in some way to the other. The themes covered in this book are of quotidian nature, and many of them invoke a sense of ambivalence due to the multifaceted nature of the work. While a number of themes have been covered in this book, perhaps the most powerful one is of overcoming. The speaker/narrator of every work seems to have seen adversity, and strives to overcome the obstacles that obscure her vision of the ultimate destination: freedom.
Another intriguing element of this book that adds to its complexity is the writing style of the author. The author has experimented with language and form in both the poetry as well as the prose, and for this reason, I found her work quite eclectic. She has eloquently told her story with a kind of fluidity that is often missing from mixed works of prose and poetry.
The amalgamation of poetry and prose in this work is another interesting aspect of the book. I feel that a writer can easily go wrong when trying to bring together different genres, but this particular writer has definitely done a good job at fusing together two seemingly dissonant genres. There is a kind of harmony in her work that I rarely find in such works.
Overall, I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars. Despite the wonderful features of the book, there are definitely times when the work becomes a bit repetitive. However, it is definitely worth a read for women of all ages.
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Waiting at the Window
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