pokemon poetry!!! i’ll take five billion copies please!!!

ok ok ok guys i am absolutely crazy about this book. and not only because poetry and pokemon happen to be two of my favorite things. capable monsters is just… so EXPANSIVE and IMPRESSIVE and EXCITING. it’s 36 pages but it’s a whole living breathing lifetime. incredibly moving, beautifully complex. and so. fucking. cool. (i mean, it’s structured ike a literal POKEDEX??? how awesome is that???)

i think w poetry, it can often be taught in a super inaccessible way. it can feel very rigid, almost antiquated. i love love love contemporary poetry that embraces the freedom, the looseness, of now - doesn’t restrict itself to writing about things on whose inherent beauty humans have always agreed. i love when contemporary poets choose instead to write about and find the poetry in the small stupid gorgeous distracting every day shit: social media, cars and texts and facetime calls, favorite albums and anime and doing the fucking laundry and in this case - pokemon, something lots of people wouldn’t ever consider to be deep or even artful. but this book rejects that, it is a book about growing up black and queer and it is a book about little monsters and it is a book about wondering if you are a monster too because that’s what you’ve been told, looking for your own power, your own strength, wondering where you fit, can you ever even be “cataloged” at all. it is gorgeous and fresh!! it is everything!!!!