The Universe of False Rhymes and Cheese // The Universe of Us

Title: The Universe of Us

Author: Lang Leav

Publication date: October 4, 2016

Pages: 240

Genre: Poetry

I wasn't sure what to expect from my first Lang Leav experience, since I discovered her through an article about "instagram poets" like her and the better-known Rupi Kaur. The article brought up the question of whether what its author dubbed "instagram poets" were actually good, and after both following and reading Lang Leav's poetry, I can honestly kind of see why. 

I'm by no means a poetry expert though I've both studied and enjoyed it in the past, but I did find that many of the pieces of prose and poetry had very weak structures that were hard to follow. A lot of the prose pieces felt like being dunked into the middle of a prose piece, and I often found myself feeling a bit lost as I was reading them. A lot of the prose was also very cheesy and overly romantic, and it seemed like Lang Leav was trying a bit too hard to be romantic and poetic.

I also hated the majority of the rhyming poetry. Those also didn't seem to have much structure that could be followed, and she used far too many false rhymes that didn't really work for my tastes. Again, a lot of the rhyming poems, like the prose, didn't feel like complete pieces to me, but instead like the middle of something. The poems and prose also had no connectivity that I could see other than the themes of romance and love. I ended up feeling like I was reading the same thing over and over again, and to be honest, none of her poems or prose pieces particularly stuck out to me. There were no pieces I wanted to mark so I could come back to, because it all just blended together into a puddle of romantic goo.

The last 50 pages or so were somewhat better, and made me wonder if she had other poetry and prose more like that than the first 150 pages. Overall though, her words didn't make much of an impression on me. Still, I would be curious to see how she would incorporate her writing style into a novel, and might actually give her first novel, Sad Girls, a try.

What's my next poetry adventure? salt. by Nayyirah Waheed.