This is a difficult review to write simply because, at the end of the day, this read was so incredibly up and down for me. The opening material is interesting and worthwhile. The poems that make up the center of the book (loosely half the book's length) are incredibly powerful, and a five-star read in and of themselves--though featuring the same voices over and over again, which did surprise me, they offer so much variety of expression, power, and gorgeous language that I read many of them repeatedly before moving on to the next. They are, without question, worth discovering and sharing, and far more polished and powerful than what you might expect from the more casual title of the book.

The truth is, if the whole book had been composed only of the intro and these poems, whether with added poems or not, this undoubtedly would have been a five-star read for me.

And yet. The last third (loosely) of the book is made up of poems and related explications of those poems, all of this written by the author who put together the collection. But even with my interest opened up to her by the opening essay, I still found it incredibly difficult to get through this section. The poems felt needlessly belabored, and often more like cut-up prose than poetry. The explications were...well...I felt like they wandered between being painfully academic and self-congratulatory. They made me dislike the author and her voice, to be honest, and I had to keep reminding myself what the first two thirds of the book had felt and looked like in order to push myself forward.

So, where does that leave me? I would absolutely recommend the first two portions of this book, the opening material and then the actual poems from the workshop. I cannot recommend what comes after them, but even so, those first two pieces--loosely a hundred pages, and more poetry than makes up many contemporary collections--are more than worth the time/effort of searching out this little-known book. ( )