the princess saves herself in this one by Amanda Lovelace

Synopsis:

A poetry collection which is divided into four sections: the princess, the damsel, the queen, & you. These are the author’s own stories of life, love, grief, abuse, empowerment, and inspiration.

Edition:

Barnes & Noble Exclusive Edition hardcover
This version has an introduction written by the author which is exclusive to this edition. In the intro, she talks about what drove her to write the poems, as well as how the book first came into being.

My Thoughts:

I have been trying to piece together the best way to review this book (and I will get to later entries in this, the Women are Some Kind of Magic series of books – I haven’t actually read beyond this one yet). I hope that what I am doing here works out.

I have included small snippets from each of the sections of the book, but I don’t want to talk too specifically about the words themselves. This book is full of raw emotion, which kind of spills out of the words themselves, so I don’t want to spoil that for you. Her story deserves to be told by her, not regurgitated by me. That being said, I will be regurgitating those few choice snippets because they’re much too beautiful to keep to myself.

The book opens with the following line:

“here lie the raw, unpolished, & mostly disjointed pieces of my soul.”

While there is certainly raw power here, and it doesn’t come off as overly polished, I do fully disagree with her assessment that it is “mostly disjointed.” The poems flow one into another in a way that feels very natural if not necessarily intentional. Her life story flows in an orderly fashion right from the start.

Sec. I : the princess

“silence has always been my loudest scream.”

I chose silence has always been my loudest scream as the snippet from the princess because although this whole section is powerful (it focuses primarily on her childhood with an abusive, alcoholic mother), this poem is a blank page – nothing but the title. I don’t know why exactly, but I felt that emptiness deeply.

I think a lot of us can relate to the notion of emptiness Lovelace evokes with that one simple omission (that being the absence of words as a method of communication in and of itself), and the terror and isolation that result from abuse in any form. It felt to me that by leaving that page blank like she did, she’s almost inviting the reader to insert themselves into her narrative which, it turns out, is going to have a happy ending after all.

Sec. II: the damsel

“blood runs wherever his fingertips graze me.”

The damsel deals with pain and death. Topics covered include a toxic relationship and the deaths of Lovelace’s mother and sister. But I think the wider theme in this section is more about the hidden struggles we all face, and the resultant feelings of loss of control.

Again, I had a lot of feeling in this section. It’s not a super fun one to read. It’s full of emotion and pain and terror. But it is sort of beautiful in the way that awful things sometimes are – there’s something attractive about humans being forced to find their inner strength.

Sec III: the queen

“flowers grow wherever his fingertips graze me.”

In the queen, we begin to find our way out of the proverbial woods. Lovelace guides us through her darkest hours and back into the light as she begins to process her grief and discover her own power. I chose the above line because I love the way it parallels that last one from the damsel. I found the dichotomy really lovely.

Here the queen finds love. She finds redemption. It almost became a little too flowery for me here, but her prose is spare enough to avoid teetering into Romantic poetry.

Src. IV: you

“they burn to kill, but you burn to survive.”

Finally, we’ve made it to Inspiration Point (I made that up – it’s not in the book, I promise). In this section everything is tidied up and we are reminded that we are powerful. And that, especially us ladies, can and should do what we can to reclaim the power that is rightfully ours. This section could have been titled: where it all gets fuckin’ feminist. Or not. In hindsight, I see why they went with something else. I do nothing so well as trying to find the line between alienating readers by swearing like a sailor (btw, the few I’ve met swore no more than usual), and trying to clean it up thereby hampering my own True Voice.

Rating:

I see this book caught a lot of shade over on Goodreads. There’s a lot of talk about how the formatting of the poems make it something less than poetry. To that I say: You don’t have to like it. But not liking something doesn’t invalidate it. You’re not the boss of poetry. Simmer down, now.

Poetry, like all writing, evolves. Author’s don’t have to follow a strict set of guidelines anymore, and I think that’s for the best. What is good is subjective, and for me, this was good. No, it’s not Pastoralism, Romanticism, or Modernism, but it doesn’t have to be! There have been so many poetry movements already – did anybody really expect that would just stop? There’s plenty of other stuff out there if you like other styles, and I’m sure there will be plenty of new as well – hold onto your hats, folks – it’ll be fine. Poetry will survive this style of social media-friendly writing too.

Not understanding where someone is coming from, or the style in which they write doesn’t remove value from what they have to say. It’s okay if you read this book, and find that it’s not for you. It’s okay to just not read it – you do you. It’s even okay to not dig on an author’s work, period (hello there, Stephen King – I see you) – what bothers me is that many of us jump straight into attack mode when we see something we don’t dig on.

Okay, so I didn’t mean for this to turn into a diatribe at the end there – my bad. Really though, poetry is a very divisive medium, even for me. Honestly, I don’t like a large portion of what I’ve read. But if you’re going to be mad at it, I hope that you can find a better reason than that you don’t like what is actually a fairly standard format for modern poetry, and that before you publicly tear it, and/or its writer to shreds, that you at least consider the fact that a very real person poured her very real emotions into the thing you’re lambasting. Take some social queues from Mr. Rogers, y’all – be kind.

And really though, this book also got a lot of love – it certainly hasn’t all been bad press. Some people really liked it, and I count myself firmly among them – social media-friendly formatting or not, her words hold weight. Give this book a chance or don’t – your call. I highly recommend it, though.

the princess saves herself in this one
Amanda Lovelace
Andrews McMeel Publishing
Poetry, Feminism, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 1532913680
Published: April 23, 2016
Author's Website