Andrea Gibson is an extraordinary modern poet who shifts gut-wrenching anger and gentle intimacy with total aplomb. This collection has great momentum. It feels almost as though you are romping through the poet's thought processes and reflections in a way which feels live and full of energy.

I both laughed and cried reading this collection. It has piqued my interest in this poet and I will now be looking to read more of her work. For now, I'll be recommending this one, You Better Be Lightning.

I absolutely loved this collection of button poetry. ‘The Museum of Broken Relationships’ is easily my favorite. I knew from the title of this book that it would have some really thought provoking pieces. It has poetry for everyone. These poems are heartfelt and relatable which is important to me. I felt like I was reading about myself on some of the pages.

I haven’t read much poetry since college, over five years ago, but the title and cover of this collection enticed me in once more. As a person who possesses an English degree, my immediate thought was to start trying to pull apart each and every poem, line by line, and dissect its meaning. But, no, I wanted to enjoy this collection in a different way. I didn’t need to dive in deep to enjoy these poems. The style is very conversational, very much like verbal storytelling. There is sometimes 'proper' form, with short lines and stanzas. Sometimes, the poems are more like paragraphs of prose.

You Better Be Lightning is full of incredibly relatable poems about seizing the day, about queerness, about living when life sucks, coping through depression, and about witnessing the small joys in life, and making them bigger than society often allows because it’s all most people get. It’s about facing yourself, and coming to terms with your imperfections and toxic traits and using that acceptance to improve. As much as there is so much negativity and uncertainty, Gibson manages to put quite a bit of positivity in the darkest of places: “If we aimed to be just half as good as one of the earth's mistakes, we could turn so much around.”

The amount of self love, of love for the planet, of love for others, familial, friendly, and otherwise, is just overflowing from almost all the works in this book. It makes me yearn for my own love, for my own home of warmth and comfort. Where home is a person and not a place, where you can find permanence in that person, some sense of stability.

I would recommend this for people who need a little encouragement to see the world around them and enjoy the little things. For queer people who don't fit into the binary and need a little reminder that life is a spectrum and they don't need to fit into one box or the other to exist. For people who need some hope but not so much that it seems impossible to do so.

“If every heart-worthy novelist weeps for days before killing off a beloved character, god must have spent centuries sobbing before pressing a pen to the page of this year.”