Catie’s Reviews > I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home > Status Update

333 pages total

I don’t think she has mentioned her father in this book without immediately mentioning that she wished he had been tougher or more manly.

Honorable mention: “My Morning Meditation” is a lovely sentiment; I cannot relate to it but I’m happy for her.

The end seems to be getting more God-y

Monastic- of or relating to monasteries or monks and nuns

A formatting choice that bothers me is when they start a 2-page poem on the right page and make it continue onto the next page that you have to flip, instead of just starting it on the left page and you can see it all at once.

It happened with both of her sons’ poems.
I also think it’s a little funny that at the beginning of this, she said she didn’t want to explain anything too much so that they could be interpreted differently by each person. But then there uber specific details and names attached to some of these poems.

Her birthday poems for her daughters were about them entering adulthood and being young women. Her birthday poem for her son babies him, and she calls herself Mummy in it.

It’s especially rough when we go from a poem I liked (208) to a stupid rhyming poem (209). They seem extra juvenile. I think she forced them to rhyme. Not forcing the rhyme makes them much more profound.

“Her/his existence” re: God
She loses me whenever she talks about God but she brings me back when she says tolerant stuff like that