Review: A Strangely Wrapped Gift

TITLE: A Strangely Wrapped Gift

AUTHOR: Emily Byrnes

RELEASE DATE: March 10th 2020

RATING: ★★★

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Genre: Poetry
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E-ARC kindly provided by the publisher.

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“they ask how I spent my whole life not knowing I was gay. I tell them a tiger raised in captivity does not realize it’s trapped.”

When you rate books, you sort of compare them to other books you’ve read before and base your judgement off of that, don’t you? Well in this case, I believe this is the second collection of poems that I’ve read, literally, ever. So it’s not like I have much experience in this field or anything so I’m definitely not one to rate this book really but I’m going to do it anyway so- I did like this? Sort of?

I think I’m going sadly going to have to say that reading poetry isn’t my favorite way of consuming literature. I prefer reading fiction I think, I feel like poetry is such a divider and sadly I fall on the side of “don’t love it”. With that being said, I kind of liked this collection. I sometimes found the poems a bit too…pretentious? But that’s probably more due to the fact that it’s /poetry/ than that it’s /bad poetry/, you know? Since this is a collection of poems, I was bound to like some and not like others as much I guess; a testament to this is me going back and reading through some poems again and again, not wanting to let go of them. As an LGBT person who struggles with some mental health issues, I found some poems super relatable and like I could really recognize myself in them.

Honestly, all in all I don’t know what else to write so I’m just going to stop here. Please disregard my rating because I feel like I can’t give this book an honest review due to my limited experiences with poetry; however, I feel like if you’re into poetry and are LGBT and/or struggle with mental health issues, you should definitely pick this up and judge for yourself. For the right reader, I feel like this could be a very good read.