‘A Poetry Chapbook’ is comprised of 10 poems. Photo courtesy of amazon.com

When purchasing anything online, one can like how the product looks, read the reviews and feel that the price is right but as the saying goes, no one ever knows what they’ll get until it’s in their hands. I bought an online copy of Ross’ ‘A Poetry Chapbook,’  and when I started reading the first poem, “Monday Morning Blues,” I felt a bit disappointed.

People will say to me, “Of course you should feel disappointed, it was only $1. What did you expect?” But I don’t like to think this way. I like to keep an open mind and just enjoy reading poetry. Unfortunately, sometimes I run into a book I just didn’t like very much.

When I read poetry, I enjoy poems that don’t always rhyme or are in a tight form or meter. I don’t exclude these forms of poetry out of my life completely, but more often than not I like to read poetry in irregular verse, poems that are even look unusual on the page. E. E. Cumming’s poems are things I enjoy when reading poetry. 

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy rhyme, but with Ross’s work, I feel her poems rhyme in a way that make them sound like nursery rhymes. I enjoy reading poetry that deals with dense topics like race, abuse, discovering oneself and things of that nature — I don’t feel like Ross does a lot of that in her poetry.

I also feel at times there are spelling errors in her poems that were not supposed to be there. Again, with writers like E. E. Cummings, there are instances where the author intentionally misspells things or writes a poem in a certain way — jumbling up sentences for a certain effect. But sometimes the author just makes a simple mistake and I unfortunately feel she does misspell things in her work unintentionally, which is unfortunate.

Here I am ranting about this work, but it is not all bad. I for one feel that her poem, “La Luna del Cacciatore- The Hunter’s Moon” is her strongest poem and I like it a lot. It’s one of the poems that doesn’t rhyme, it’s three pages long and deals with mythical and magical subjects.

Also, I feel the reasons why I don’t like this work are reasons that I feel many others would like this work. Her writing is very straightforward — no overly complicated language that people need to really study and wade through to get to the meaning. The reader understands her and her poetry clearly. Also, a lot of her poems rhyme, which is something I think most people expect from poetry and would be happy to read.

It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I don’t discourage people from reading it at all. It’s  very affordable, short and easy to access online through Amazon. If you want something quick to read that isn’t too complicated, I feel that Ross’ collection would be a perfect fit.

Kaitlyn Dahle is a staff writer for The Dakota Student. She can be reached at [email protected]