The Hate Poems
Author: John Tottenham
Genre: Poetry
Year: 2018
Rating: 9 of 10
Years ago I discovered a logic loop for the path toward success. If you make your goal to fail, then if you fail – you succeed, and if you succeed you still succeed. A full proof attitude toward achieving success. John Tottenham seems to have harnessed this logic loop for the creation of poetry. This book is full of beautiful and honest failure, a litany of things that most people leave unsaid. But Tottenham doesn’t hold back and lays it all down on the table, while allowing the work to be sardonically funny. What looks like uncertainty and self-loathing strikes me as an elaborately planned ruse in the name of comedy. Even the introduction looks down upon the work, and instead of praising the book criticizes it heavily. While I would have given the book a 10 rating it self-consciously falls just shy of making it… so 9 it is.
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