Lying to Our Mothers

This will be the first random book of Poetry I will read. The first section offers very little. In fact, it seems like the poet is trying to convince her reader that she was a "bad" kid and that these poems are an apology of sorts. Or, I have no idea because the voice is 100% female. So I finished section two and it was almost completely made up of the speaker from section 1 talking about protecting her daughter from all the creeps and the rapists out there in the world. However, one poem stands out from all the rest..."Learning to Read" with a dedication to Elizabeth Brewster is, at this point, the best poem in the book. It will be a part of my Creative Writing 20 course and possibly a poem I use when I talk about reading and writing during class discussion of The Book Thief. So, if a book of poems has ONE great poem then I would argue it was worth buying or stealing it. Sadly the third section uses the tired A, B, C, et al pattern to start each poem...poems about the daughter leaving home. The final section sees the female speaker musing on her current life and quietly wishing for a different one. Mostly, all of this is boring. As mentioned, only the one poem matters to me.