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A review by sapphisms
Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology by Tyler Chin-Tanner, Wendy Chin-Tanner
3.0
i received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
overall, i'd say this anthology is tepid - it's neither cohesively bad or cohesively good, but i think that there are some wider formatting issues that really drag the whole thing down. stand-out poems like 'good bones', 'a love letter to the decades i have kissed', 'half girl then elegy', 'birth', and 'to the cherry blossoms on 16th and wharton' are sometimes muddled or even lose some of the meaning with the formatting, and the visuals make it difficult to read. 'good bones' i think is one of the most disjoined, as the visuals just show a woman moving out and a couple moving in, where the poem reads more about trying to rear children optimistically to show the good in the world, though the world 'is at least half-terrible'.
in terms of the best merging of visuals and poetry, 'a love letter to the decades i have kissed or notes on turning 50' and 'birth' are amongst the best in the anthology, and 'drown' is also very good. i think that 'birth' is probably the only poem in the anthology to have 100% conveyed the structured of the poem accurately through the art, as the poem itself is a concrete poem in the shape of a wishbone 'V', and the associated comic maintains that shape and parallels it in many of its pages.
overall, i'd say this anthology is tepid - it's neither cohesively bad or cohesively good, but i think that there are some wider formatting issues that really drag the whole thing down. stand-out poems like 'good bones', 'a love letter to the decades i have kissed', 'half girl then elegy', 'birth', and 'to the cherry blossoms on 16th and wharton' are sometimes muddled or even lose some of the meaning with the formatting, and the visuals make it difficult to read. 'good bones' i think is one of the most disjoined, as the visuals just show a woman moving out and a couple moving in, where the poem reads more about trying to rear children optimistically to show the good in the world, though the world 'is at least half-terrible'.
in terms of the best merging of visuals and poetry, 'a love letter to the decades i have kissed or notes on turning 50' and 'birth' are amongst the best in the anthology, and 'drown' is also very good. i think that 'birth' is probably the only poem in the anthology to have 100% conveyed the structured of the poem accurately through the art, as the poem itself is a concrete poem in the shape of a wishbone 'V', and the associated comic maintains that shape and parallels it in many of its pages.