Break Your Glass Slippers

I’ve been reading a lot of long novels in 2020 so far, so I was excited to take a quick break with the latest poetry collection by Amanda Lovelace: Break Your Glass Slippers. Billed as the start of a new series and a play on the Cinderella story, it’s got the usual heart of a Lovelace collection and her signature style,but definitely feels a little self-helpy at times.

I’m the first to admit I hated my poetry classes in college. I never really felt like I fit in there, I struggled to ‘get’ things sometimes, and the adherence to form stressed even my Type A butt out a lot. But I do truly like Amanda Lovelace’s style. She writes like we think, captures ideas and lets them stand on their own. Her poems can be heavy and dark but they don’t overwhelm you with drawn out metaphors or obsessive rhyme schemes. Rather, you get to exist in the poems. And I’ve loved all of her collections so far–this one was good too.

The collection started by saying it was a kind of focus on Cinderella, and I got that in a few places, but not cohesively throughout. Some segments were much longer than others in the collection, so much that I was surprised when it ended. Similarly, much of it felt “self-help”-y rather than genuinely reflective, and while I did enjoy it, it’s not my new favorite.