Author: Blythe Baird
Pages: 104 pages
Version: ARC (Ebook)
Publisher: Button Poetry
Rating: ★★★★
Synopsis
If My Body Could Speak is about fighting for the space one takes up in a world that would rather they take up none at all. Blythe Baird deftly and uniquely charts a course through various modes of womanhood and women’s bodies. Through love, loss, and the struggles of disordered eating, If My Body Could Speak uses sharp narratives and visceral imagery to get to the heart of a many-layered existence, speaking to many generations at once.
Review
This book was provided by the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Button Poetry and Netgalley!
Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants,
but she does not understand how it will hurt.
If My Body Could Speak is a poetry collection about love, LGBT+, loss, rape and eating disorders. If My Body Could Speak is the first book I read by Blythe Baird and I loved it!
Looking back, I wonder why survival
was my entertainment of choice.
If My Body Could Speak was such a beautiful and honest collection. I could relate to so many poems and a lot of them had a big impact on me. For example, I’ve never had an eating disorder but I often struggle (d) with food and some of these poems were really relatable and I could really get what Blythe Baird was talking about.
She would rather take a photo
of me wincing with a boy
than smiling with a girl.
Favourite poems:
- Before the Starving
- Dress Code
- Girl Code 101
- Blood-rose
- Pocket-sized Feminism
- I Don’t Have to Forgive You
- The Ghost Who Stars in My Poetry
- Class Clown
- Too Pissed to Be Sad Anymore
- The Way I Was Taught to Love
- The Kindest Thing she Almost Did
- Smoke
- Lipstick
- For The Rapists who Called Themselves Feminists
- Balancing
- The Aesthetic of Rape Culture
- To Live in the Body of A Survivor
- Relapse
- Horoscopes for Self-Doubt