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If All the World and Love Were Young
When Stephen Sexton was young, video games were a way to slip through the looking glass; to be in two places at once; to be two people at once. In these poems about the death of his mother, this moving, otherworldly narrative takes us through the levels of Super Mario World, whose flowered landscapes bleed into our world, and ours, strange with loss, bleed into it. His remarkable debut is a daring exploration of memory, grief and the necessity of the unreal.
115 pages, Paperback
First published August 29, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
May 8, 2020
"for no reason except for
being alone I try to scream into the wildness of the world.
I make no sound: the flakes of snow are noisier in the falling
the berries are loud with colour on the back windowsill a bird
has written its name in footprints a handful of steps at the door.
The voice is made of whatever is left how the world is dented.
This poetry collection piece together a memoir of Stephen Sexton's younger years, structured around his obsession with Super Mario World. I had anticipated this to be a fun anthology, due to the brightly coloured cover and the gaming elements the synopsis hinted at. It was far from that and all the more poignant because of it.
Through the lens of the games that consumed him, Stephen details his mother's cancer and his inability to fully understand what ails her. When saving princesses is so obtainable in one world, saving one's own mother is so out of reach in another. It is the juxtaposition between the two that these poems return to, again and again, creating a sorrowful and heart-felt anthology full of raw emotion. The cultural references were the springboard for far more hard-hitting topics and I deeply appreciated the honesty and beauty each poem conveyed.
being alone I try to scream into the wildness of the world.
I make no sound: the flakes of snow are noisier in the falling
the berries are loud with colour on the back windowsill a bird
has written its name in footprints a handful of steps at the door.
The voice is made of whatever is left how the world is dented.
This poetry collection piece together a memoir of Stephen Sexton's younger years, structured around his obsession with Super Mario World. I had anticipated this to be a fun anthology, due to the brightly coloured cover and the gaming elements the synopsis hinted at. It was far from that and all the more poignant because of it.
Through the lens of the games that consumed him, Stephen details his mother's cancer and his inability to fully understand what ails her. When saving princesses is so obtainable in one world, saving one's own mother is so out of reach in another. It is the juxtaposition between the two that these poems return to, again and again, creating a sorrowful and heart-felt anthology full of raw emotion. The cultural references were the springboard for far more hard-hitting topics and I deeply appreciated the honesty and beauty each poem conveyed.
March 31, 2020
This is a highly original hybrid of video game imagery and a narrative about the final illness of his mother, who died in 2012. As a child the poet was obsessed with Super Mario World. He overlays the game’s landscapes onto his life to create an almost hallucinogenic fairy tale. Into this virtual world, which blends idyll and threat, comes the news of his mother’s cancer:
Her doctors are likened to wizards attempting magic –
– until they give up and acknowledge the limitations of medicine:
Super Mario settings provide the headings: Yoshi’s Island, Donut Plains, Forest of Illusion, Chocolate Island and so on. There are also references to bridges, Venetian canals, mines and labyrinths, as if to give illness the gravity of a mythological hero’s journey. Meanwhile, the title repeats the first line of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh, which, as a rebuttal to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” eschews romanticism in favor of realism about change and mortality. Sexton wanted to include both views. (He discusses his inspirations in detail in this Irish Times article.)
Apart from one rough pantoum (“Choco-Ghost House”), I didn’t notice any other forms being used. This is free verse; internally unpunctuated, it has a run-on feel. While I do think readers are likely to get more out of the poems if they have some familiarity with Super Mario World and/or are gamers themselves, this is a striking book that examines bereavement in a new way.
Note: Be sure to stick around past “The End” for the Credits, which summarize all the book’s bizarrely diverse elements, and a lovely final poem that’s rather like a benediction.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
One summer’s day I’m summoned home to hear of cells which split and glitch
so haphazardly someone is called to intervene with poisons
drawn from strange and peregrine trees flourishing in distant kingdoms.
Her doctors are likened to wizards attempting magic –
In blue scrubs the Merlins apply various elixirs potions
panaceas to her body
– until they give up and acknowledge the limitations of medicine:
So we wait in the private room turn the egg timer of ourselves.
Hippocrates in his white coat brings with him a shake of the head …
where we cannot do some good
at least we must refrain from harm.
Super Mario settings provide the headings: Yoshi’s Island, Donut Plains, Forest of Illusion, Chocolate Island and so on. There are also references to bridges, Venetian canals, mines and labyrinths, as if to give illness the gravity of a mythological hero’s journey. Meanwhile, the title repeats the first line of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh, which, as a rebuttal to Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” eschews romanticism in favor of realism about change and mortality. Sexton wanted to include both views. (He discusses his inspirations in detail in this Irish Times article.)
Apart from one rough pantoum (“Choco-Ghost House”), I didn’t notice any other forms being used. This is free verse; internally unpunctuated, it has a run-on feel. While I do think readers are likely to get more out of the poems if they have some familiarity with Super Mario World and/or are gamers themselves, this is a striking book that examines bereavement in a new way.
Note: Be sure to stick around past “The End” for the Credits, which summarize all the book’s bizarrely diverse elements, and a lovely final poem that’s rather like a benediction.
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
April 2, 2020
If All the World and Love Were Young is a collection of poems structured around Nintendo’s classic Super Mario World. In this otherworldly narrative, Stephen takes us not only through the game’s levels – as the visceral, flowered landscapes bleed into our world – but also a step further along in his mother’s cancer journey. The collection is an imaginative, moving depiction of how video games become a way to slip through the looking glass; a way for a nine-year-old boy to be in two places at once when he needs an escape from reality. Overall, this is a lucid, emotional exploration of memory, grief, and the necessity of escapism.
September 2, 2019
I’ve been looking forward to this collection for months, having admired Stephen Sexton’s work since I first heard him read from his pamphlet, Oils. I was not disappointed! This is an imaginative, moving and fresh narrative poem. The title, If All the World and Love Were Young, comes from a pastoral poem by Walter Raleigh, while the poems themselves follow the structure of Super Mario World, each section named after a level of the game. This collision of lyric tradition and innovative, modern references is a defining element of Sexton’s work.
Sexton and I are roughly the same age; we are, by the current definition, Millenials. This is the first collection I’ve read that captures something of being born around 1990, filtering life through cultural references, knowing that we live on a dying planet, and wondering what exactly we’ve been handed by earlier generations. Using Super Mario World as a jumping-off point allows Sexton to vividly explore the ways in which we’re indebted to pop-culture and how it defines not only our conversations, but our internal landscapes. He explores the expansiveness of video games, and the joy of escapism, as well as the ways in which it limits us.
At the same time, Sexton is writing lyric elegies, and is well aware of the poetic tradition of Northern Ireland, and the broader English-speaking world. This collection centres on the death of a mother, and uses both the structure of a video game and the traditions of writing about grief to explore a huge personal loss. Sexton uses long, expansive lines, setting the scene of ‘Yoshi’s Island’, “the archipelago aswim with joyful blue-white puffer fish” over “the idle effacement of dying / the many prickles of needles of many exotic compounds.”
This use of long lines paired with unusual imagery means the collection does not immediately yield its emotional weight to the reader. Instead, the reader travels to ‘Donut Plains’, where “Kappa swarmed in every colour under a waxing crescent moon” or to ‘Forest of Illusion’, as the reader encounters Sexton’s gift for imagery of the natural world,
the knot of dark eyes signalling in the goat willow’s eastern skin
or the spiny caterpillar making letters on the branches
is as familiar to me as sunset must be to nightfall.
The realities of death and loss are brought gradually to the reader’s attention, allowing their impact to be experience on many different levels, such as the loss of an imagined future, the loss of faith in the body, the loss a companion, the loss of a way of being, the loss of family. Sexton is very much in control of his work: he brings the reader with careful and exact patience to the heartbreak, so that we become part of the journey of loss. Super Mario World aids him in this: it allows the reader to share an internal landscape with the narrator of the poems, so that we we feel the grief as our own, so that when the narrator says, “this is the wrong universe among all the universes,” we are with him.
The section, ‘Valley of Bowser’, towards the end of this collection brings us to the heart of the emotional landscape. We are in a “deep blue sea” where “swells a sense of falling down through the bottom of the world.” We have come to the edges of language. We meet the narrator’s mother in hospital, where the narrator feels, “I’ve been here so long I think I hear my children passing the door.” The section is full of echoes of other parts of life, or lives unlived, “The portable television we brought from home is standing by,” acting as a portal to one of these worlds. The loss of a future is symbolised by the act of speech as the mother says, “No grandchildren and no first steps and never again a first word.” We learn the mother’s first word was “apple”, and when the narrator realises the mother can no longer speak to him, he returns to this word in a deeply moving elegy, “what kind of story do I tell apple is the longest story / I know let’s see how does it go again apple apple apple”
Sexton has a fantastic gift for capturing an internal space and making it accessible to the reader. He writes with maturity and patience, allowing his elegies to enter the reader’s mind, and creating an intimacy and as well as an expansive view of the modern world. The idea of centring a collection around a video game might feel gimmicky in lesser hands, but here it lends only depth and focus to the word. Sexton’s voice and his work feel entirely fresh and entirely assured: what he is doing may be new, but he is completely in control. I am moved, excited and enthralled by this collection.
Full disclosure: I have never in my life played Super Mario World.
Sexton and I are roughly the same age; we are, by the current definition, Millenials. This is the first collection I’ve read that captures something of being born around 1990, filtering life through cultural references, knowing that we live on a dying planet, and wondering what exactly we’ve been handed by earlier generations. Using Super Mario World as a jumping-off point allows Sexton to vividly explore the ways in which we’re indebted to pop-culture and how it defines not only our conversations, but our internal landscapes. He explores the expansiveness of video games, and the joy of escapism, as well as the ways in which it limits us.
At the same time, Sexton is writing lyric elegies, and is well aware of the poetic tradition of Northern Ireland, and the broader English-speaking world. This collection centres on the death of a mother, and uses both the structure of a video game and the traditions of writing about grief to explore a huge personal loss. Sexton uses long, expansive lines, setting the scene of ‘Yoshi’s Island’, “the archipelago aswim with joyful blue-white puffer fish” over “the idle effacement of dying / the many prickles of needles of many exotic compounds.”
This use of long lines paired with unusual imagery means the collection does not immediately yield its emotional weight to the reader. Instead, the reader travels to ‘Donut Plains’, where “Kappa swarmed in every colour under a waxing crescent moon” or to ‘Forest of Illusion’, as the reader encounters Sexton’s gift for imagery of the natural world,
the knot of dark eyes signalling in the goat willow’s eastern skin
or the spiny caterpillar making letters on the branches
is as familiar to me as sunset must be to nightfall.
The realities of death and loss are brought gradually to the reader’s attention, allowing their impact to be experience on many different levels, such as the loss of an imagined future, the loss of faith in the body, the loss a companion, the loss of a way of being, the loss of family. Sexton is very much in control of his work: he brings the reader with careful and exact patience to the heartbreak, so that we become part of the journey of loss. Super Mario World aids him in this: it allows the reader to share an internal landscape with the narrator of the poems, so that we we feel the grief as our own, so that when the narrator says, “this is the wrong universe among all the universes,” we are with him.
The section, ‘Valley of Bowser’, towards the end of this collection brings us to the heart of the emotional landscape. We are in a “deep blue sea” where “swells a sense of falling down through the bottom of the world.” We have come to the edges of language. We meet the narrator’s mother in hospital, where the narrator feels, “I’ve been here so long I think I hear my children passing the door.” The section is full of echoes of other parts of life, or lives unlived, “The portable television we brought from home is standing by,” acting as a portal to one of these worlds. The loss of a future is symbolised by the act of speech as the mother says, “No grandchildren and no first steps and never again a first word.” We learn the mother’s first word was “apple”, and when the narrator realises the mother can no longer speak to him, he returns to this word in a deeply moving elegy, “what kind of story do I tell apple is the longest story / I know let’s see how does it go again apple apple apple”
Sexton has a fantastic gift for capturing an internal space and making it accessible to the reader. He writes with maturity and patience, allowing his elegies to enter the reader’s mind, and creating an intimacy and as well as an expansive view of the modern world. The idea of centring a collection around a video game might feel gimmicky in lesser hands, but here it lends only depth and focus to the word. Sexton’s voice and his work feel entirely fresh and entirely assured: what he is doing may be new, but he is completely in control. I am moved, excited and enthralled by this collection.
Full disclosure: I have never in my life played Super Mario World.
March 8, 2021
3.5 stars
Im not really a poetry reader but i can appreciate the concept and enjoy the language. The .5 is for the sadness i felt... it hit
Im not really a poetry reader but i can appreciate the concept and enjoy the language. The .5 is for the sadness i felt... it hit
March 27, 2020
Sometimes a way of coping with events in the real world is to head back to the things that gave you comfort in the past. For Stephen Sexton this means heading to the world of Super Mario Kart, where he spent lots of his youth racing against the characters in this colourful and larger than life world. It was a place that infused his reality and gave him lots of happy memories to look back on.
It is this nostalgic place that he returns to in this book frequently as the poems take us through the various tracks and characters in the game. The fun though is short-lived, because all the way through, he has the agony of watching his mothers illness develop to the point where it finally claimed her.
For a collection of poems that leans heavily on gamer references about a fun thing to play, it is heavily draped with sorrow and grief. I liked the way that he varied the pace and structure of the poems, and having those two themes running all the way through, it builds into a narrative thread and feels like we are sharing his grief. Definitely one to read again one day.
Three Favourite Poems
Donut Plains 1
Chocolate Secret
#7 Larry’s Castle
It is this nostalgic place that he returns to in this book frequently as the poems take us through the various tracks and characters in the game. The fun though is short-lived, because all the way through, he has the agony of watching his mothers illness develop to the point where it finally claimed her.
For a collection of poems that leans heavily on gamer references about a fun thing to play, it is heavily draped with sorrow and grief. I liked the way that he varied the pace and structure of the poems, and having those two themes running all the way through, it builds into a narrative thread and feels like we are sharing his grief. Definitely one to read again one day.
Three Favourite Poems
Donut Plains 1
Chocolate Secret
#7 Larry’s Castle
September 5, 2021
A tidily aching memory of pixels and loss. A little overworked in its sectional correspondence to the levels of the original Mario game. However, this device is one of two which give a beautiful structure and aesthetic to Sexton's grief: written in 16 syllable lines to match the 16 bit memory of his console, through these clunky sentences and strange landscapes he draws a simple nostalgia and a rich thread of imagery which bring the reader "in through the translucent panels of the front door stained with roses". Yes, that's what a 16-syllable line feels like! To conclude with another excellent pair,
"the smoke signals across the eaves say all I really mean to say
I have gone to rescue my friends I'll think of you and you and you."
"the smoke signals across the eaves say all I really mean to say
I have gone to rescue my friends I'll think of you and you and you."
August 6, 2023
I love the concept of this book and it sometimes lives up to its premise, but overall it fell a bit short for me. The poet weaves together his childhood experiences of playing Super Mario World with those of dealing with his mother's illness and eventual death. When the book works, you can real feel how the imagery of the game is bleeding into reality and the reality is influencing the child's understanding of the game.
Too often though, I didn't really see much of the game being reflected in the poems or get any sense of why specific elements of the game were important to the author. Having a poem dedicated to each level just seems to push the concept too far. From my own experience, particular games really do summon up strong memories and emotions from the time when I originally played them, but that doesn't mean that every single level holds a rich vein of meaning.
Still, worth a read and has some very good moments. I'd love to see the concept experimented with further.
Too often though, I didn't really see much of the game being reflected in the poems or get any sense of why specific elements of the game were important to the author. Having a poem dedicated to each level just seems to push the concept too far. From my own experience, particular games really do summon up strong memories and emotions from the time when I originally played them, but that doesn't mean that every single level holds a rich vein of meaning.
Still, worth a read and has some very good moments. I'd love to see the concept experimented with further.
September 28, 2019
This was ok. I think I like the idea of this book more than the actual content contained within. It's a collection of poems based on Super Mario and is mainly about a mother's death from cancer and memory. The Super Mario theme is obvs metaphorical for going on a journey, a quest, etc. I liked the poem about the uncle who was a miner, who died in Tasmania, as it creates an interesting parallel with Mario (who's a miner himself of sorts, isn't he?). The comparisons of Mario w Dante were also v interesting. I loved the poem that had the image of Otzi the Iceman, waiting for thousands of years with berries in his gut, extending a frozen hand. So cool! And the other poem about looking at fossils of dinosaur stampede and wonderig what spooked them. So yeah, as you can see, big theme here of time etc.
However, there was too much descriptive writing for my personal taste. I found a lot of the poems quite dull to read because I don't like reading endless description; I like lines in which you can hear a voice or personality. For example, I really liked it when the author addressed the reader directly at the end: "this has not been easy thank you friend you are a super reader." That made me "awww." Overall this is a clever idea and obviously very moving and emotionally affecting material but it's a tiny bit gimmicky.
Some lines I liked (see how direct and plainly stated they are? I just... don't like reading descriptions of mountains and cactuses):
- it will be an adventure I think it will be an adventure
the future is cannon blasting yes
- should he step wet out of the lake I will offer to him kindness.
I will offer soba noodles in soy I will offer my name
- Since she has lost her sense of taste we have dinner in McDonald’s.
If I’m going to die she says I might as well go to McDonald’s.
- having been nowhere but long in front of the beautiful television
- wasn't it strange we used to live like that?
- Cheese can mean almost anything
- No one is going to like this I say but I have done my best.
- That the world unmercifully will not end is the hardest thing
- On a beautiful day in June we take the pain to the hospital.
- Some things we chose to disregard: the cruelty of newspapers
- I will myself to contain it (I thought this was SUCH a beautiful line about learning to deal with/manage grief about the death of a parent)
- I once tried to make a monument from the Television’s On/Off button
Should I pray to gods of thunder or the wounded gods of myself
However, there was too much descriptive writing for my personal taste. I found a lot of the poems quite dull to read because I don't like reading endless description; I like lines in which you can hear a voice or personality. For example, I really liked it when the author addressed the reader directly at the end: "this has not been easy thank you friend you are a super reader." That made me "awww." Overall this is a clever idea and obviously very moving and emotionally affecting material but it's a tiny bit gimmicky.
Some lines I liked (see how direct and plainly stated they are? I just... don't like reading descriptions of mountains and cactuses):
- it will be an adventure I think it will be an adventure
the future is cannon blasting yes
- should he step wet out of the lake I will offer to him kindness.
I will offer soba noodles in soy I will offer my name
- Since she has lost her sense of taste we have dinner in McDonald’s.
If I’m going to die she says I might as well go to McDonald’s.
- having been nowhere but long in front of the beautiful television
- wasn't it strange we used to live like that?
- Cheese can mean almost anything
- No one is going to like this I say but I have done my best.
- That the world unmercifully will not end is the hardest thing
- On a beautiful day in June we take the pain to the hospital.
- Some things we chose to disregard: the cruelty of newspapers
- I will myself to contain it (I thought this was SUCH a beautiful line about learning to deal with/manage grief about the death of a parent)
- I once tried to make a monument from the Television’s On/Off button
Should I pray to gods of thunder or the wounded gods of myself
September 3, 2019
I really loved this collection. I read a review which intrigued me because the book is about the poet's memories of the years when as a teenager he played Super Mario World whilst his mother was going through treatment for cancer. It's dense, allusive, it sounds beautiful, and it demands reading and re-reading. I can see it would not be every person's cup of tea, but I found it very beautiful and heartbreaking.
There is a section at the end called CREDITS which is a guide to all the influences and allusions that Sexton makes, and it is worth going through it when rereading the poems to see where and how the echoes and resonances come from. As an English teacher, I would love to work on this collection with students, although I suspect it might do their heads in! Just an extraordinary window into the human mind and the experience of grief.
There is a section at the end called CREDITS which is a guide to all the influences and allusions that Sexton makes, and it is worth going through it when rereading the poems to see where and how the echoes and resonances come from. As an English teacher, I would love to work on this collection with students, although I suspect it might do their heads in! Just an extraordinary window into the human mind and the experience of grief.
April 7, 2022
4.5 rounded up.
What a fascinating collection to read alongside Vuong’s Time is a Mother; in both books, the authors attempt to come to terms with the loss of their mum (each from cancer), through ingenious and inventive use of the carefully chosen terms and techniques of their poetry.
In Sexton’s work, the virtual worlds of Super Mario interbleed with the poet’s real life and it’s landscape of loss, providing escapism and a sense of teleology - a goal at the end of each level (that each poem is strikingly named after), at the end of the game - towards which one can battle the ghosts of grief; platforming through the ever-shifting environments of mourning. I’ve never read anything like this and was initially so intrigued by the premise, being a bit of a gamer myself. I was expecting an allegorical, far less nuanced collection, however— Mario searching for a swept-away Princess Peach across a posthumous terrain; Bowser becoming a symbol of Death, for example. What I discovered was a much more subtle, intricate exploration of memory and its glitching machinery. Although, I confess, the geek in me would have liked a bit more specific use of the Mario video game source domain.
What a fascinating collection to read alongside Vuong’s Time is a Mother; in both books, the authors attempt to come to terms with the loss of their mum (each from cancer), through ingenious and inventive use of the carefully chosen terms and techniques of their poetry.
In Sexton’s work, the virtual worlds of Super Mario interbleed with the poet’s real life and it’s landscape of loss, providing escapism and a sense of teleology - a goal at the end of each level (that each poem is strikingly named after), at the end of the game - towards which one can battle the ghosts of grief; platforming through the ever-shifting environments of mourning. I’ve never read anything like this and was initially so intrigued by the premise, being a bit of a gamer myself. I was expecting an allegorical, far less nuanced collection, however— Mario searching for a swept-away Princess Peach across a posthumous terrain; Bowser becoming a symbol of Death, for example. What I discovered was a much more subtle, intricate exploration of memory and its glitching machinery. Although, I confess, the geek in me would have liked a bit more specific use of the Mario video game source domain.
November 5, 2021
Reflections and lessons learned:
“…the storm crumbles the bank into the river and what can I say
this has not been easy thank you friend you are a super reader”
Funky
This book took me a few attempts to get into, and each time I opened it I had to make the ‘coin dislodged’ de-ding noise in my head… but that was not the soundtrack that this content demanded. A really interesting juxtaposition of escapism and dealing with realities, and a reminder that these worlds are not unusual. I think that I missed a lot of the context as I only realised at the end, but several lines that cut very deep - maybe just a bit more random than I had expected
“…the storm crumbles the bank into the river and what can I say
this has not been easy thank you friend you are a super reader”
Funky
This book took me a few attempts to get into, and each time I opened it I had to make the ‘coin dislodged’ de-ding noise in my head… but that was not the soundtrack that this content demanded. A really interesting juxtaposition of escapism and dealing with realities, and a reminder that these worlds are not unusual. I think that I missed a lot of the context as I only realised at the end, but several lines that cut very deep - maybe just a bit more random than I had expected
July 6, 2024
Sexton's framing of childhood grief alongside playing Super Mario World is such a unique and personal collection that I found it nearly impossible not to go back and reread several of the poems as I read this, mentally making connections between the levels in the games and the imagery he weaves. There's a brutal honesty with the mourning and loss of his mom but also that sense of child-like wonder mixed in, and generally, I found myself caught up in each world as I went through each section (divided into each world of Super Mario World). One of the few collections I've found myself enjoying, start to finish, in recent memory.
September 2, 2020
This is very beautiful and moving and sad, it undulates just like grief.
'And if you find some day dear friend my sad head upon your shoulders
go out into the world and say world it's been so long world hello.'
'And if you find some day dear friend my sad head upon your shoulders
go out into the world and say world it's been so long world hello.'
September 30, 2025
“i want my monument to be composed of light as you might say / so you can see it friend not the things themselves but the seeing of them / the light stopping on them i adore you tree i adore you world” <3
December 7, 2022
“this has not been easy thank you friend you are a super reader”
September 11, 2021
A wonderful collection of poems that guide the reader through Super Mario World while also navigating the grief and stress of losing someone you love. The poems are whimsical, beautiful, haunting, and often highly technical. 'Top Secret Area' is a new favourite.
On a personal level, my own mother is an avid gamer and has multiple chronic health issues that leave her facing the risk of dying each day. This poetry collection was poignant and touching. It was something I didn't know I needed to read, but I'm immensely glad I did.
On a personal level, my own mother is an avid gamer and has multiple chronic health issues that leave her facing the risk of dying each day. This poetry collection was poignant and touching. It was something I didn't know I needed to read, but I'm immensely glad I did.
May 22, 2023
Reading this for a class, I appreciate my wonderful niece’s efforts to contextualize the Super Mario World through-line which added a lot to my understanding.
February 21, 2020
[rating = B]
Dealing with the death of his mother, Stephen Sexton blends Mario and the sadness of loss in interesting ways. Although sometimes the blend was too close-knit, once you got the rhythm of the poetry, it was easier going. I am disappointed in the edition though; Sexton's lines are long and the publisher should have made the pages wider to accommodate them (instead, they had to awkwardly be enjambed). At times there is a brilliance of emotion and reality, or avoidance of reality, there are also many poems that did not strike as sure of themselves. This is in part because they worked to make the whole, rather than working as single poems. I am happy this won the Forward Prize, for it is forward-thinking, but it seemed a bit undercooked, too. Worth a read all the same!
Dealing with the death of his mother, Stephen Sexton blends Mario and the sadness of loss in interesting ways. Although sometimes the blend was too close-knit, once you got the rhythm of the poetry, it was easier going. I am disappointed in the edition though; Sexton's lines are long and the publisher should have made the pages wider to accommodate them (instead, they had to awkwardly be enjambed). At times there is a brilliance of emotion and reality, or avoidance of reality, there are also many poems that did not strike as sure of themselves. This is in part because they worked to make the whole, rather than working as single poems. I am happy this won the Forward Prize, for it is forward-thinking, but it seemed a bit undercooked, too. Worth a read all the same!
February 3, 2025
videogames dos anos 90 não são meu forte
September 3, 2019
One of those rare and precious books: the world seems different after reading it.
Read
October 14, 2019This is an extraordinary, moving collection of poems whose dense, constrained forms are the forms the intellect takes when it is coping; the self takes when it can, as it must; when the subject envelopes. This book is as rich + sustaining, as memorable + inimitable as is the loved one's voice. You will follow it across the Causeway, into the beached whale in Donegal, into the pixelated hyacinths and the heavy rain. With the munificent vocabulary of Alan Gillis and the gut-punched wisdom of Anne Sexton and Denise Riley, the speaker claims: 'I tried to make a monument from the emptiness of the house.' Sexton has made a monument. Readers: crowd around it.
December 9, 2024
nostalgic for something i never even played ! maybe nostalgic for nostalgia itself? wish i'd got more time to have time to have something
April 6, 2024
4.5 stars
I thought this would be a silly little book about a silly Italian plumber and instead I ended up in tears, wow.
I thought this would be a silly little book about a silly Italian plumber and instead I ended up in tears, wow.
March 22, 2020
“and now I think I / remember what I mean to say which is only that once / when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing / once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light”
“I want my monument to be composed of light you might say / so you can see it friend not things themselves but the seeing of them / the light stopping on them tree I adore you I adore you world”
“These are the days of no letters her signature starved with jitters / in the few half hours she’s awake to make arrangements: no flowers / or no more than is natural for a swift discreet funeral / and burial with her parents tea and sandwiches afterwards. / She sleeps the undertaker leaves the fountain leaks in the courtyard. / My head is heavier than stone. I read yesterday’s newspapers / not either asleep or awake let me please die is what she says. / It’s me I’m here is what I say but I am not since she is not. / Then she says I want to go home once more for one once more one night / and I say you can’t go home now she says I know not now after.”
“The rhinoceroses dodder like a basso obstinato / in the valleys between mountains in their scooped-out eroded cirques. / If there is magic in their horns they seem indifferent to it / trudging along instead upon the khaki-coloured mountain path. / I want to call them dinosaurs but that’s not even kind of close: / those hundreds of millions of years that supercontinent makes break. / In Queensland there was that fossil showing a dinosaur stampede: / hundreds of sharp little talons but no sign of what had spooked them. / Thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes ago / these glyphs are all they’ve left behind. One clear night not so long ago / we all stood out in the garden wondering up at the comet / whose memory is very long who we hope still remembers us.”
“And if you find some day dear friend my dad head upon your shoulders / go out into the world say world it’s been so long say world hello.”
“I want my monument to be composed of light you might say / so you can see it friend not things themselves but the seeing of them / the light stopping on them tree I adore you I adore you world”
“These are the days of no letters her signature starved with jitters / in the few half hours she’s awake to make arrangements: no flowers / or no more than is natural for a swift discreet funeral / and burial with her parents tea and sandwiches afterwards. / She sleeps the undertaker leaves the fountain leaks in the courtyard. / My head is heavier than stone. I read yesterday’s newspapers / not either asleep or awake let me please die is what she says. / It’s me I’m here is what I say but I am not since she is not. / Then she says I want to go home once more for one once more one night / and I say you can’t go home now she says I know not now after.”
“The rhinoceroses dodder like a basso obstinato / in the valleys between mountains in their scooped-out eroded cirques. / If there is magic in their horns they seem indifferent to it / trudging along instead upon the khaki-coloured mountain path. / I want to call them dinosaurs but that’s not even kind of close: / those hundreds of millions of years that supercontinent makes break. / In Queensland there was that fossil showing a dinosaur stampede: / hundreds of sharp little talons but no sign of what had spooked them. / Thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes ago / these glyphs are all they’ve left behind. One clear night not so long ago / we all stood out in the garden wondering up at the comet / whose memory is very long who we hope still remembers us.”
“And if you find some day dear friend my dad head upon your shoulders / go out into the world say world it’s been so long say world hello.”
April 26, 2022
The whole collection is tightly tied to one idea: the death of Stephen Sexton’s mother, framed by his obsession with Super Mario World. And that idea works. It works incredibly well, somehow never feeling repetitive.
Sexton mixes a more conventional poetic vocabulary with a specialist one: medical terms, modern brand names and vernacular speech all seep into even his most flowery, descriptive poems. The combined effect is often gorgeous. Taken from ‘Yoshi’s Island 4’:
Since it’s August she begins the idle effacement of dying
the many prickles of needles of many exotic compounds
hormones and corticosteroids the stiffening of the larynx
mouth the dry of the walk alone into the desert finding there
those cactuses their open arms and their long curious shadows.
Sexton's main theme is grief. He's also interested in fantasy: what separates it from reality? Can it help to process grief, or is it more of a realm of avoidance?
I generally enjoyed reading this just for Sexton’s sensitivity to poetic rhythm, and for the endlessly creative ways in which he pairs words. Near the end there’s a particularly interesting ‘Credits’ section, where Sexton lists things that inspired him for nearly four pages, including ‘my mother’, ‘my house’, ‘Andrew Marvell’, ‘the Mariana Trench’ and ‘hallucinogenic mushrooms’. They’re all given in chronological order of their appearance in the poems, so you can go back through and track down each reference. If you really want to bother. I assume the literature students are thrilled.
As Stephen Sexton is Northern Irish, I'm probably legally mandated to announce that this is my favourite poetry debut since Seamus Heaney's. And, luckily, it actually is.
Sexton mixes a more conventional poetic vocabulary with a specialist one: medical terms, modern brand names and vernacular speech all seep into even his most flowery, descriptive poems. The combined effect is often gorgeous. Taken from ‘Yoshi’s Island 4’:
Since it’s August she begins the idle effacement of dying
the many prickles of needles of many exotic compounds
hormones and corticosteroids the stiffening of the larynx
mouth the dry of the walk alone into the desert finding there
those cactuses their open arms and their long curious shadows.
Sexton's main theme is grief. He's also interested in fantasy: what separates it from reality? Can it help to process grief, or is it more of a realm of avoidance?
I generally enjoyed reading this just for Sexton’s sensitivity to poetic rhythm, and for the endlessly creative ways in which he pairs words. Near the end there’s a particularly interesting ‘Credits’ section, where Sexton lists things that inspired him for nearly four pages, including ‘my mother’, ‘my house’, ‘Andrew Marvell’, ‘the Mariana Trench’ and ‘hallucinogenic mushrooms’. They’re all given in chronological order of their appearance in the poems, so you can go back through and track down each reference. If you really want to bother. I assume the literature students are thrilled.
As Stephen Sexton is Northern Irish, I'm probably legally mandated to announce that this is my favourite poetry debut since Seamus Heaney's. And, luckily, it actually is.
August 4, 2020
This wonderful selection of poetry caught my eye a few months ago while I was browsing the shelves looking for something new to add to my collection. I saw the pixelated Super Mario coin on the cover and was immediately intrigued by the thought of the merging of poetry and video games (two of my loves, even though one of them is quite recent). I was not disappointed.
While it took me a while to grasp the way that Sexton writes, I was soon completely enamoured and hooked by his writing and sped through the whole of the book on a short one-hour flight from Glasgow to London. The poems within the book each take their title from a different world or setting within the Super Mario Universe such as Yoshi’s Island. Each poem takes us through the journey of Sexton growing up and delving into the world of video games as a way of escaping the illness that is taking his mother’s body.
As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss.
I don’t have much else to say about this amazing collection of poetry, apart from that I do recommend it to anybody looking for something new to try. I give it a solid 4/5.
While it took me a while to grasp the way that Sexton writes, I was soon completely enamoured and hooked by his writing and sped through the whole of the book on a short one-hour flight from Glasgow to London. The poems within the book each take their title from a different world or setting within the Super Mario Universe such as Yoshi’s Island. Each poem takes us through the journey of Sexton growing up and delving into the world of video games as a way of escaping the illness that is taking his mother’s body.
As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss.
I don’t have much else to say about this amazing collection of poetry, apart from that I do recommend it to anybody looking for something new to try. I give it a solid 4/5.
April 3, 2020
I found this to be a stunning piece of work. I wondered how mixing the world of Super Mario World with grieving would work, but somehow it just does! It had me smiling at the memories it created in my mind about playing Super Mario World and the escapism that the game offered, and had me crushed by his descriptions of watching someone he loves be so ill and dealing with loss and grief.
What really comes across is the honesty and emotion that he was clearly going through. How do you make sense of watching the world around you and all that you know crumble away? For him, losing himself every now and then in a fantasy world of a video game was the release he needed. It mixes the memories of different levels in the game - seeing the names appear and the challenges in each level made me smile with fondess! - alongside memories of his family and his mother. Life provides challenges of its' own and we are all competing in the video game of life - with hopefully no big bad beastie/boss at the end to have to defeat.
I thought this collection was a pure gem that left me in tears. It was beautifully written, poignant but punchy, raw but refined and how the little moments during his life now meant so much to him. Cannot recommend this highly enough!
What really comes across is the honesty and emotion that he was clearly going through. How do you make sense of watching the world around you and all that you know crumble away? For him, losing himself every now and then in a fantasy world of a video game was the release he needed. It mixes the memories of different levels in the game - seeing the names appear and the challenges in each level made me smile with fondess! - alongside memories of his family and his mother. Life provides challenges of its' own and we are all competing in the video game of life - with hopefully no big bad beastie/boss at the end to have to defeat.
I thought this collection was a pure gem that left me in tears. It was beautifully written, poignant but punchy, raw but refined and how the little moments during his life now meant so much to him. Cannot recommend this highly enough!
July 29, 2025
É um pouco estranho escrever uma review de um livro de poesias, porque não é um tipo de leitura que não entendo muito, só pego e vou de mente aberta para tentar tirar uma experiência legal e esse livro foi bem diferente de outros de poesia que já li, mas foi uma surpresa bem agradável. Acho que exige um nível muito alto de talento para uma pessoa escrever de forma tão bonita e ao mesmo tempo conectar coisas tão distintas como o mundo do Mario e a experiência da doença/morte da mãe. Se alguém me fala por falar, penso que isso seria uma receita para o desastre, mas pasmem, ficou muito bom! Me levou para uma atmosfera particular, que deixou tudo muito interessante de explorar.
O meu poema favorito é Forest Of Illusion 4:
Ela planta rosas no jardim o corte cicatrizou.
Com uma pazinha eu vou enterrando os bulbos que ela espalha.
Parece outra vida ela pensa todos os dias passam satisfeitos
com incensos de âmbar amoras crescendo nos pés de amora.
Ela nunca mais será a mesma é claro mas ninguém será.
Agora que o corte sarou a noite faz tanto silêncio
que se tentar você quase ouve as rosas dormindo nos bulbos.
O meu poema favorito é Forest Of Illusion 4:
Ela planta rosas no jardim o corte cicatrizou.
Com uma pazinha eu vou enterrando os bulbos que ela espalha.
Parece outra vida ela pensa todos os dias passam satisfeitos
com incensos de âmbar amoras crescendo nos pés de amora.
Ela nunca mais será a mesma é claro mas ninguém será.
Agora que o corte sarou a noite faz tanto silêncio
que se tentar você quase ouve as rosas dormindo nos bulbos.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 10, 2021
This is a beautiful, surreal tribute to grief and childhood nostalgia, and how we could take comfort in the unreal. Sexton wrote so poignantly about experiencing the loss of his mother against a backdrop of Super Mario World and created a highly original, powerfully evocative work, which managed to make me tear up in multiple places. It paints something I and perhaps many others about my age could relate to: growing up with video games, finding solace in the escapism and the adventures and sometimes letting them carry you through especially challenging times in life.
One thing I found difficult to process would be the style of writing. Sexton wrote the poems as long run-on sentences with almost no punctuations, which washes the book over with a dream-like feel as the images blend together. However, at times I felt the emotions could not be perceived immediately because of the structure. I would give it a 3.5 rounded down to 3, though truthfully if I were more apt in stomaching this level of freeform poetry, I would give it a solid 4.
One thing I found difficult to process would be the style of writing. Sexton wrote the poems as long run-on sentences with almost no punctuations, which washes the book over with a dream-like feel as the images blend together. However, at times I felt the emotions could not be perceived immediately because of the structure. I would give it a 3.5 rounded down to 3, though truthfully if I were more apt in stomaching this level of freeform poetry, I would give it a solid 4.
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