A Constellation

by Hannah MacKenzie

I was your star, and I thought it was a compliment. Until I realized you never wanted the stars. And so amid my brokenness, I found myself. Newly formed, a constellation, a force to be reckoned with.

166 pages, Paperback

Published June 14, 2018

Reviews

[James Hogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Right. With this one, where do I begin? I found it in a Half-Price books a few months back and have been reading it on and off since then. This is an emotional book of poetry, and I think I bought it because as I started reading a few poems standing in the aisles at the book store, I realized I was captivated by the honesty and rawness of it. It is definitely not a good book to read after a break-up (or maybe it's the perfect book!??) and I found myself mostly reading this at lunchtime as I was afraid it would emotionally move me too much if I read it late nights! It's tough to judge the quality of this book, but I struggle to rate most books of poetry (except the best of the very best - I need to read more Eliot). The poetry in this is...there. It's not exactly well-written, polished poetry, but does it have to be? I want to give this author props merely because she so brutally and with great exactness offers up her heart, bare and bleeding for all to see. It takes guts to put a book like this out into the world. And though I could harshly judge some of the sentiment (that reminds me of teenage me! ...and possibly more than I would like to confess, even present me in my low moments) that the author puts forth in these poems, I'm grateful for the medium of writing that allows us as humans to pour forth our follies, fears and pride. This book is (mostly) full of angsty relationship and break-up poems and I hesitate to justify why I kept reading this, but perhaps the mere act of reading this was a kind of communion between myself, the author, and my past self, all of us in varying voices baring our very souls. Something about the rage and pride that seeps from these poems wearies me, yet I know the same demons. And the tears that I can see spotting every page of this book? Those are real tears.