I'm going to write two reviews for this, as I am also reading a chapbook by Aparna called Calcium Rich. This was a fun little chapbook about making yogurt and recovering from their leg being broken due to being runover by a car.

Aparna uses several different formatting, has a great erasure of her own poem, and does an incredible job of packing a lot of themes and stories in a book that's primarily focuses on legs and yogurt.

Airport Ritual: Sometimes a poem hits hard enough that you check the minutiae page to find out if the book is really recent or if the author was some sort of cynical Nostradamus, who, it turns out, was right the whole time. It's recent. Their wound still fresh enough that touching it will leave blood on your fingertips. So don't touch. Nod your head at the poem. Close the book for a minute, instead of turning the page. The world, and our country, is such a terrible place to be human these days. How lucky you are that this poem didn't happen to you.

Every Day: I hate that I read the phrase "blue sky" and think "Twitter 2: This Time It's Less Personal". This poem is so plainly spoken, you can see it walking down the street, trying not to be noticed but willing to reach out if someone else trying to be noticed needs their help.

Personal Statement: Every poem, no matter how obtuse, no matter if it's persona work, is a declaration of who a writer is. So when a writer says "This poem is who I am," it is doubly or triply so. It's often performed in front of an audience where at least one person, not often in the front row, lets out a loud hum of recognition, and sits a bit straighter in their chair.

Every Morning I Walk Through A Field: The you that was secretly the narrator transitions into you, the audience. Watch the poem. Earlier, the poet imagined exploding into the sky and becoming rain. Now they want you to know that becoming rain wasn't a punishment, it's a desire. Sometimes. But sometimes you run into desire at a party, and accidentally call it by punishment's name.

Makeup Ritual: In my life there is nothing more beautiful than dissociating in front of a mirror Later, It helps to have a name even though (a name is a room you can never leave.*

Questions For Your Admirer: The other night, Comrade and I were watching "Swiss Army Man". When it was over, he said, I can tell you didn't like it.

(I thought it was ok, but I hated the ending. The acting was great. The premise was interesting the reveal of where it took place made sense, and changed the feel of the whole film. I understood why it went on as long as it did, and why it ended the way it ended. But I wished it had been over at a different point, and had a different message. * I told this to Comrade and he nodded.

I thought that's what it was.

I'm grateful that I'm at a point in my life where I absolutely could go out and try and get more people to understand so deeply who I am that they don't need to try and correct the way I think or speak to them, but I don't need to do that because I have such a person at home. Also, I understand and treat him the same way. I wish that for the voice in this poem.

The Heat Death Of The Universe: I mean this in the kindest way. How am I only on page ten? I've been reading this book my whole life.

The Threat: A horror movie that tells you it's a horror movie, but for a few minutes at a time you can imagine it's a romantic comedy, a slice-of-life introspective film, a documentary with no tragedy at the end. But, no. It's a horror movie.

As He Killed Me, I Imagined Him: As a child, I made a pact with bees, wasps, and hornets. I would never try and kill one, for any reason, as long as they never stung me again. I have stayed loyal to this contract that absolutely no stinging creature ever agreed to. Every time one flies near me, i imagine it will be the day they try and sting me to death for the hubris of my imagination.

I Want To Write A Poem: I generally and genuinely dislike most poems about writing poems. But I understand the urge to write them. I'm glad this one had something to say.

Return To Light: Some collections of poems are a series of seemingly unrelated pieces that come together as sort of a mosaic of a story. This is one of those collections that, so far, reads as one long poem broken up into bits small enough that you feel comfortable putting it down at any point, and picking it back up without worrying you'll need to go back and catch yourself back up.

Warm: ibid

Birthday Suits: Never trust anyone who wishes you were more like them.

Coming Out: I don't think God would like what you've done to her.

She was a dream at the beginning of time who could never imagine all this blood.

To My Parents: "I am/I will be" poems are a staple of middle-high school poetry prompts. Usually, I find them useful only in the way that one of the "I am" or "I will be" lines can jumpstart a different poem. It's difficult to make the list poem version of this prompt interesting enough to stand on its own. Espinoza has mastered this form with her "I was" list poem.

Snow: The short hops between phrases are a deft touch for this poem constantly in motion.

The rest of the book, which features perfectly good poems that I couldn't muster the inspiration to write individual interactions with: Even when a themed book is good, it does often feel repetitive. None of the rest of the poems in this book were bad, or undeserving of being read. I just grew weary of reading them, the way it must have been wearying to live them.

There is a sizable faction of comic fans who hate even the idea of their favorite character being reimagined as anything other than a mediocre white guy. I'm not one of them. I love when a bland white dude superhero is reimagined in a way that makes them more interesting than their predecessor.

For example, Jane Foster is my favorite Thor because she wasn't just some Norse God swinging a hammer. She had cancer, and every time she powered up as Thor to protect the Earth, it undid all of her chemotherapy, so saving the Earth was literally killing her, but she did it anyway. That's so much cooler than the blond haired prince whose brother was mean to him.

Falcon's time as Captain America was great because he often ended up fighting villains that hated him because "Captain America shouldn't be Black", which was a perfect representation of terrible, racist comic fans.

The idea of a Lebanese immigrant framed for crimes, because he isn't white, being given a Lantern ring is intriguing. I find Jessica Cruz much less interesting, mainly because her backstory seems to center on "women are emotionally weak".

Unfortunately, most of this book is Simon and Jessica proving to be just as incompetent and useless as Hal Jordan, Guy Gardener, Kyle Rainer, and (to a lesser extent) John Stewart. They don't use their rings well, the villains overtake them easily, they bicker amongst themselves, and triumph out of pure luck. Neither of them are likeable when they're in uniform. (Even in space, All Cops Are Bastards.)

This did not inspire me to want to read more Green Lantern books. I am starting to wonder if, outside of the Geoff Johns/Blackest Night-era, there are any Green Lantern books, I'd recommend.