Pepper posted a couple months ago  "I want to be a person who reads poetry, but the truth is that I'm not."  and I can kind of identify with that.  I like to occasionally pick up a poetry collection, but I find that it takes a different kind of appreciation than novels or even short stories.  In most collections I've read, there's two or three poems that stick out but I find it hard to take in the book as a whole.  When I read poetry I'm reminded of a quote from this article about people's responses to a live poetry reading.

We’re introduced to poetry as it relates to the concept of the rhyme at a young age. We all read and loved Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and to us, that’s what poetry was. Then, when we encounter it later in high school or college, we learn that rhyming is bad and so are clichés. This new poetry is hard to understand, and we still love Shell Silverstein.

I like that idea and the thought behind it.

With all that said, this past month I read Brink a collection by Shannah Compton.  And while I think I still ran up against the same issues that I usually do when reading poetry, I enjoyed a lot of the poems and a lot of the lines within those poems.  My favorite was "Critical Animal Studies", in particular the last four lines.

Critical Animal Studies

Let us creep apart from them.
Let us be eternal cynics who despise
things like polo and expatriate accents.
Except, I will continue to say dishabille
as scantily as I envision it, whatever rules
we make, alluding again and again
to the porcelain lamp I flick on and off
in my elliptical dream. Let us welcome
the wounding of our structures, their division
into parcels of turned-away desire.
Then let us take down all the fences,
position the floodlights to capture
the glory of the dark procession
as our creatures stumble free.

Share what you've been reading this month below, or maybe share a poem you've enjoyed.