Mouthful of Forevers

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That being said, there weren't really any poems in this that connected with me the same way as before. (Then again, sometimes it felt like "Dream Girl" was written for me alone. Just the poem about my decade long obsession, Courtney Love, hit home hard considering I read it in a room that used to be covered in her posters.) The poems felt more general than previously, and I found myself tiring from her heartbreak poems before I even really read them. With Clementine, I crave specificity. Another thing is that it’s internet poetry, it started online and I have immense respect for Von Radics for starting up Where Are You Press, it’s an amazing feat and I love what she’s trying to do with it. However, sometimes the internet bleeds into her poetry. There’s an ‘internet speak’ to it that falls completely out of place, for me, anyway, perhaps I only see it because I spend so much time on tumblr myself. And sometimes things just don’t seem to make a lot of sense? Her 2015 poem ‘For Teenage Girls’ went viral on YouTube with the words, “you don’t have to grow up to find greatness. You are so much stronger than the world ever believed you could be.”

III. The last time I tried to scream I felt my father climbing up through my throat and into my mouth. I received an ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for the free poetry collection!* von Radics: I don’t know about other people, but when I write about an emotional experience, it’s never a very good poem. People’s diary entries aren’t very good poems. There’s just a lot of pain and anger. I want to wait until I have a little bit more perspective on whatever has happened and I can phrase it in a beautiful way, so I can have a sense of compassion to the other people in the story and make it more true rather than subjective. I try to wait until it’s more of a concise story and not just scrambling to write about the willy-nilly.

About Maya Martin

Poetry tends to be very hit and miss with me, especially collections that are incredibly personal for authors. Those stories are, of course, always important to tell. But I've come to realize that my enjoyment of poetry boils down to two things. First, how well I understand said poetry. Because if I'm being completely honest, sometimes it flies right over my head. And second, if I can relate to it. I've found that most of my favorite poetry, like the quote featured above, is poetry that I can relate to.

In Assyrian myths, the goddess of fertility, Atargatis, cast herself into a lake and became a mermaid.von Radics: It started as a joke with a friend of mine, actually. She asked, what advice would you give to teenage girls, and I was like, what advice would you give to any teenage girl or what advice would you give to Anne Frank? What advice would you give to Joan of Arc? What advice would you give to any of these people? Then it became this really cool idea of what if you could use this device telling teenage girls how important and powerful they were by saying at this age, people were doing this. At 13, Anne Frank was writing this book that millions of people would read. Malala won the Nobel Prize for what happened to her at 15. Cleopatra became queen when she was 18. That became a really interesting idea, and I was a very young woman at the time, 22, and I had younger sisters, and it just felt like a very important message to me to say that you don’t need to be embarrassed and you don’t need to doubt yourself. There are people who will doubt you, and you are stronger than those people. A number of the poems are lyrical without being purple and empowering without making me inwardly cringe. In retrospect, it did feel something like a daydream in its pretty pose and whimsical delivery. However, the real selling point for me was that most, if not all, of the poems felt as though it could be relevant to a number of scenarios. Quite often I feel as though poetry demands a lot of me. It tells me how to feel, forces me into experiencing situations I don't want to relive or haven't experienced and wouldn't want to, to satisfy the catharsis the author hopes to share with me. This didn't feel like that. This anthology felt versatile enough to allow me to put whatever spin I wanted to on the meaning behind some of the poems, to feel however I wanted to about them and to extrapolate ideas to my own situations, or not, if that's what felt right in the moment.

von Radics: What was I like as a teenager? [laughs] I was scared and lonely. Nerdy. I really, really loved art. And I was very, very excited to be a grown-up. I had a couple of friends that I still really, really love that I knew as a teenager. Definitely, the best years of my life have been since I was a teenager. I came from my deleted tumblr. I still remember the feeling when I read this poem. It had hit me hard cuz it was simple. It is simple but not cheesy. The world is waiting for you to set it on fire. Trust in yourself and burn.” — ‘ For Teenage Girls’ by Clementine von Radics Whilst I didn't love this poetry anthology in the way I would have hoped to, I found it to be really versatile and exceptionally sensitive to detail. In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive is, conceptually, an exploration of a series of ideas surrounding love in its various stages, some uglier than others. There were some poems that were okay but I could still feel the emotion behind her words. I cannot wait to read some of her other poetry collections!Mermaids appear in Greek mythology as well. Achilles’ mother was said to be a Nereid named Thetis. Another notable Nereid was Amphrite, who married Poseidon and whose son is Triton, a merman. Clementine von Radics is my favourite contemporary poet of many years. I've been waiting for this one for a while now.