Each week in 300 words

A Night Without Armor

To be honest, I'm not really sure how to write a review on a book of poetry, so I hope this is somewhat close.
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I read "A Night Without Armor" by Jewel (the singer chick from Alaska) because I remember being obsessed with her first album way back in middle school and I thought her songs were so poetic. Once I found out she'd written a book of poetry, I wanted to read it, and this provided me with the perfect opportunity.
I won't lie, the majority of her poems had the same feel to it - either depressed, introspective, or lovey. But there was still that movement of words and feelings that just...FELT poetic. After a while, you could tell which words she really loved. Broken, lonely, blood. I started to remember a problem in my stats class that said that the average poem has about 5.2 new words (or something close to that) with a standard deviation 17? I forget. Anyway, I think she's within the stats.
Overall though, at least if you're a woman, there's a great connection that these poems make with the reader. I say "if you're a woman" because I think that men interpret poetry much differently than women so I don't want to assume anything, especially when this poetry is very clearly "feminine." Maybe the connection happens because they're so raw and point out things you didn't even know you had noticed. Like there's this one poem:
I wrote you those nice
poems only because
the honest ones
would frighten you
And it made me think about our own personal censorship, sometimes because we're frightened it'll hurt others, but mostly I think we just don't want people to hate us.
The poems themselves are all free verse, and she tends to have very short lines save for those few poems are are more like prose poetry or are "stories in poem form." The titles are generally either the first line of the poem or the location/time of where she was when she wrote the poem, which can be either creative or lazy, I'm not sure which. All of them are very "in the moment," seeing a woman on the street, or analyzing one singular emotion that occurs right then. It's not particularly unique by any means, but since when does poetry have to be superspecial? Sometimes you need that extra kick of beautiful sadness or overwhelming inner strength.

posted by Debbie @ 5:02 PM