a beautiful composition of broken

(This book is from my personal library; lowercase letters in the title and author's name are intentional as that is how the title and their name on the book is written)

Book's Author: r. h. Sin

Genre: Poetry

Rating: Five Paws

***

I know that poetry books do not tell a story all the time and poetry is not everyone's taste, but if you are a woman, you need to read this book (and his other book whiskey words and a shovel II which I've also reviewed).

When I say the word poetry, most of you probably think sad, dark and twisty poems about internal struggle and how hard life is, or the romance and beauty of life and everything it has to offer to you, right?

I guess for certain poems by r. h. Sin, this generalization applies; however, it isn't the main focus of his poetry: empowering women is. At least, that's how I interpreted it. His poems are short with the message clearly stated in them throughout, and his focus is women and how we don't need men to make us feel good; we are powerful on our own, and men should live up to us and our awesomeness.

As a junior in high school, I'm still trying to figure out what being a woman means. How I am to conduct myself with men (or at this stage in the game, boys really), in society in general, and how to present myself to different groups of people. It sounds silly, but it seems important to us at sixteen, when we don't know really who we are yet.

Reading Sin's book, I felt like he was telling me to just do it: be a woman. There aren't guidelines to being a woman, and that boys (or men) are not a reason to suppress myself and everything I can do just because I am a girl and I want him to like me.

For a man to write this, it would seem that he has no idea what he's talking about, being a girl now, but he does it in a way that is empowering, not condescending. On top of that, he avoids flamboyant and "fluff" words, telling in his poems exactly what he wants to say in minimal words. Some of his most empowering poems are delivered in two lines.

Besides the empowerment of women, Sin also talks about heartbreak, newfound love, and more heartbreak, mixed in with poems about coffee, and self-encouragement when you're down, all of which are delivered in concise little thoughts that make you feel what he wants you to feel.

Sin is talented, and his poems convey this. The amount of poems he's published also speaks to his determination to make people feel. The book is constructed simply, but the words it contains are anything but. And though it deals with romance, the majority of his romantically inclined poems are not sappy, which makes them bearable to read (as I find sappy poems, well, sappy).

Overall, the book was perfectly composed to show women that they are perfect the way they are, that love is not always beautiful, and that love is not all you need to go on. I would recommend this book to girls that need a pick-me-up, someone that just lost a partner in a breakup, or someone that needs that push back toward self-worth. Sin's words make you feel worthy no matter the situation, and that seems important when writing poetry.

-T