Title: Love Looks Pretty on YouAuthor: Lang Leav
First Published: January 29, 2019
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Pages: 226
Genre: Poetry
Format: eARC
Source: NetGalley
Rating:
Synopsis:
The much anticipated new book by international bestselling author Lang Leav. A breathtakingly beautiful collection of contemporary poetry and prose, offering powerful insights into love, heartbreak, relationships, and self-empowerment.
Filled with wisdom and encouragement, every single page is a testament to the power of words, and the impact they can have on the relationships you build with others. And most importantly, the one you have with yourself.
Lang Leav captures the intricacies of emotions like few others can. It's no wonder she has been recognized as a major influencer of the modern poetry movement and her writing has inspired a whole new generation of poets to pick up a pen.
Love Looks Pretty on You is truly the must-have book for poetry lovers all over the world.
Review
I’ll be honest and admit that I had been avoiding reading any of Lang Leav’s books after seeing a few poor reviews and snippets from her first two poetry collections. Since it has been a few years and I’ve been greatly enjoying poetry, I decided to give this author a chance. I grabbed an ARC and I was actually pleasantly surprised. Love Looks Pretty on You is Leav’s seventh published work and it’s clear that she has grown as a writer.
The issue that I had previously seen in some of Leav’s old poems was that they were overly simple, full of silly rhymes and meaningless purple prose. In this new collection, I was pleased to find a great deal of maturity in Leav’s words as a young woman that has grown up learning the joy of love, the pain of loss, the anger that comes with betrayal, and the subtle regret over missed opportunities. Many of her poems still contained rhymes, but they had an easy flow to them while still discussing some very grown-up themes. I particularly enjoyed the longer more meditative pieces such as Letter to the Past. Many of them were insightful and were like snippets of the author’s life.
Now there are still patches of pesky purple prose that spend a good deal of time describing flowery scenes of nature or light and I really don’t care for these types of empty passages. I know that it’s trying to paint a picture for the reader, but I really find the overabundance of physical descriptors to be meaningless and boring. Relying too heavily on flowery descriptions to make a sentence more interesting seems to be a bad habit of many modern young poets. Overall, it’s good to see Leav coming into her own and developing a style that is uniquely hers. I enjoyed this collection and will be looking into more of her other work in the future.
Quote
“There is a savagery to what you feel. It eats you up inside. But you will get through it; you don’t need his mouth to placate you. You don’t need his hands to untangle the butterfly knot in your heart. Your love is a fire that will burn itself out. Let it ravage you.”
About the Author
About Lang Leav
Novelist and poet, Lang Leav is an international bestselling author and winner of a Qantas Spirit of Youth Award, Churchill Fellowship and Goodreads Choice Award. Often credited with popularizing poetry among a new generation of young readers, Lang’s poetry books, and hit novel, Sad Girls continue to top best seller charts around the world.
Lang has been featured on CNN, SBS Australia, Intelligence Squared UK, Radio New Zealand and in various publications, including Vogue, Newsweek, the Straits Times, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
She currently resides in New Zealand with her partner and fellow author, Michael Faudet.
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