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!!!!

At first I was frustrated with having to keep up with character descriptions rather than their names ("The One with the Beautiful Voice", "The Secret Keeper", "The One Who Runs Away", etc), but once I got ahold of them in my mind it went a lot smoother. Having read the book Annihilation earlier this year almost felt like a precursor to tolerating nameless characters (The Biologist, The Psychologist, The Linguist, etc).

That being said, once I locked in I absolutely loved the voice of the narrator shifting from omniscient to first person ("we"), it was so JARRING and it honestly felt like someone coming up behind me and whispering those lines in my ear when I wasn't expecting it. I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator and unconventional POV so this was the perfect blend.

There were some graphic body horror aspects that I liked because it takes a lot in a book to make my skin crawl. I thoroughly enjoyed the gradual suspense by way of confusion and then horrific realization. The journey the author took us on was a wild ride for only taking place in one location.

Coincidentally, I'm also reading The Willows by Algernon Blackwood right now and I had no idea that they'd be soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo similar but wow what an experience to read them in parallel. The Willows is a classic so it's a bit more long-winded but both books serve up suspense and eerie atmosphere on a platter that I happily gobbled right up as a double order.

I only docked 0.5 stars from this review because it did take me about a quarter of the book to really get into it, but after that it was all downhill (in the best way).