Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Book Review; “A Black Girls Poetry For The World” by Kimberly Larocca

A Black Girls Poetry

                              A Black Girls Poetry For the World (Volume 1)

Poetry can be an intense and deeply personal art form. It can celebrate nature, the human condition, love, loss and almost anything in the human imagination. It can be high and lofty and full of flowery language, or it can be as simple as a tear drop, a laugh, a quiet smile.

Kimberly LaRocca’s very touching, insightful book of poetry is all of that and more. It’s a celebration of love, desire, anger, need and many more thoughts and feelings that we all may experience in a single day of living. Yet, it feels a lifetimes worth of soulful expression.

I read these poems over two nights….the first time. Then I reread them over the past two weeks as I found them drifting into my thoughts during the day and felt a need to revisit them.

I needed to make sure I wasn’t forgetting a line, or remembering it incorrectly. I needed to see if that was what the author, the poet meant. Whether I was interpreting it correctly. Then I realized, that  you really couldn’t misunderstand them, that they were personal, yet universal,  and allowed the reader to let them translate themselves. A Black Girls Poetry For the World . Really, it is simply Poetry For The World, simple and elegant, reflecting on love and desire and harsh reality. Melancholy and joy, laughter and tears. A days  journey, a years journey and all the emotion, large and small.

This isn’t the clever language of Shakespeare, or even the lofty words of Frost. This is thoughts and feelings in words we might speak to each other, but with a deeper meaning than we ever do. LaRocca bares her soul, and by doing so bares ours. She shows us her pain, her joy, her love and shows us our own.

Maybe that is what poetry is supposed to be. Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. Poetry is what happens when life happens and LaRocca understands that and conveys it to us so very well.

The Dirty Lowdown

Article first published as Book Review: A Black Girls Poetry For The World by Kimberly Larocca on Blogcritics.

Copyright © 2011 Robert Carraher All Rights Reserved

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