3 stars

Poems about the pain, oppression, & triumph of surviving life as a woman, from a diverse set of women (cis, queer, trans, enby, straight, POC, etc.) poets. There are some quite good poems, but many that felt repetitive & vague to me (thus only a 3 star rating).

[What I liked:]

•There are some gems in here, including poems by Linda M. Crate, Carina Bisset, Julieanne Lynch, Patricia Gomes, H. Grim, Tiffany Michelle Brown, & Morgan Sylvia.

•I appreciate that this collection includes representation of diverse writers, who are speaking from a variety of lived experiences & backgrounds, yet all are united by the unique beauties & horrors of womanhood.

•There are a lot of relevant topics explored in this collection: sexual violence & liberation, sexism & societal oppression, childbirth & reproductive health issues & bodily autonomy, self harm, body image struggles, etc. It’s refreshing to see some of these less-often addressed themes represented by such passionate female voices.


[What I didn’t like as much:]

•Several of these poems didn’t seem to fit the “horror” genre description very closely. I guess that all depends on your definition of horror, though. Some of the themes & the way they’re explored (particularly self harm & mental illness) feel very similar to many of the contemporary poem collections I’ve read recently. So I guess it’s that some of these poems don’t seem particularly “horror” in comparison.

•A lot of the poems in this collection felt repetitive & vague: depictions of aging bodies & self-inflicted harm through decaying nature metaphors & gory descriptions of flesh being flayed. Not that any are badly written, they’re still very evocative, but they started to blur together after awhile. Possibly since many of them just express a general sense of rage & pain with similar language & images, without any concrete links the source of those emotions and/or personal contextualization.

CW: sexual assault, mental illness, sexism, eating disorders, self harm, suicidal ideation, miscarriage(?), abusive relationships/domestic violence

[I received an ARC ebook copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Thank you for the book!]

Thank you, NetGalley and Black Spot Books for a chance to read and review this ARC!

While I loved the concept behind this collection, most of the poems weren't for me. Unfortunately, a lot of poems seemed armature and trite. However, there were some that really stood out and I'm going to be looking for more by those poets.

These guys deserve a solid A for effort, but as a whole, this book fell short of my expectations.

A poem collection from a heap of different authors that's perfect for the spooky season. Some of the poems in here are dark. As a huge horror movie fan I jumped at the chance to read this book. And I wasn't disappointed. Some of the poems in here where alright but there were a few stand outs for sure. Definitely worth picking up if you are a fan of horror and poems. But it also in not for the faint of heart. Some of these poems are confronting.
Plus that cover ❤️❤️.

This was so haunting and beautiful, I just loved it. It was exciting to see how the authors perceive their bodies, their femininity, their identity and power. The prose was painful and delicate. Everyone should read this poetry collection, it’s amazing and full of creepiness.

Being a super fan of the monstrous, and given the description of this book and the mention of body horror, I was hyped to read this women and non-binary femmes horror poetry collection.
Sadly, I find few and small horror poems in this book.
It enrolls pretty well with the new wave of women poetry, that talks about pain and gender roles and beauty standards and how men has wrong us. But it doesn’t bring anything new; the poems are all very similar to some I have already read two years ago when Kaur and Lovelace boomed (or bloomed). It certainly adds little to the horror genre. And it’s mostly merged with the repudiation of societal norms and beauty ideals.
Some poems where really good; or at least were what the premise promised. (We, by Morgan Sylvia; metamorphosis by Marceau; Something that needs destroyed by Crate; and What the dead girl is trying to say… by King-Miller, among others). Most of them acutely following the proposition of horror themes.
Unsatisfactory I was hoping to read a new surge of women in horror, in every aspect of it (spaces that have been denied to us for centuries), but I guess we are still limited to the horror that the patriarchy plunges into our own bodies.