Glass Hearts and Broken Promises

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While I was holding onto you, you were letting me go. While I was fighting to keep everything together you didn’t care about staying and you decided to leave (64)

I’d spent forever waking up beside you. Learning the way you liked your coffee. Listening to what brought you joy in this world and consoling you when things didn’t go as planned. It was brutal letting all that go. I was suspended in a future that I thought we both had wanted and now that that’s gone (111) I thought of our very first fight. I thought of the way you yelled. I thought of the first time I caught you keeping secrets from me the things that you never told me but somehow, I already knew. The ones that made me feel worthless and unloved the ones that I pushed aside because I loved you… And then I thought of our last day together the last day we were two halves of the same whole the day we talked and cried as we agreed that this was the end (131) And second, some lines just don't really make sense. The logic is entirely missing, or at least a big enough part of it that I can't follow. Glass Hearts & Broken Promises is a very modern collection of poems in that it has no rhymes, no verse, no titles, and barely any punctuation. And that could have been fine! Some of my favourite poems ever are in free verse! Anyone who's ever read any poem Mary Oliver wrote knows free verse can be done well.Here, however, it served absolutely no purpose. It didn't create any ambiguity and the line breaks didn't highlight anything or make it more poignant. There was no assonance, no rhythm created by line length or repetition - I even struggled to find a single metaphor, anaphora, oxymoron, or literally any other literary device. Really? Trauma? For context, she doesn't describe anything actually bad, just as painful as hinted at by the sentence about the pictures documenting their falling out of love.)

This was just not good. Someone must have broken the author's heart really badly and they must have put all their feelings into these poems, but in sense of poetry and literature this this book gave me nothing. I'm sorry your heart broke and I'm sure that someone who also got their heart broken could find some comfort from this book and reading about someone who relates, but other than that I don't have much positive to say.

Glass Hearts and Broken Promises

I’m over the nausea and the crying but you’re still the first thing I see as I get up in the morning and the last as I close my eyes at night (118)