This wonderful selection of poetry caught my eye a few months ago while I was browsing the shelves looking for something new to add to my collection. I saw the pixelated Super Mario coin on the cover and was immediately intrigued by the thought of the merging of poetry and video games (two of my loves, even though one of them is quite recent). I was not disappointed.

While it took me a while to grasp the way that Sexton writes, I was soon completely enamoured and hooked by his writing and sped through the whole of the book on a short one-hour flight from Glasgow to London. The poems within the book each take their title from a different world or setting within the Super Mario Universe such as Yoshi’s Island. Each poem takes us through the journey of Sexton growing up and delving into the world of video games as a way of escaping the illness that is taking his mother’s body.

As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss.

I don’t have much else to say about this amazing collection of poetry, apart from that I do recommend it to anybody looking for something new to try. I give it a solid 4/5. ( )

Sometimes a way of coping with events in the real world is to head back to the things that gave you comfort in the past. For Stephen Sexton this means heading to the world of Super Mario Kart, where he spent lots of his youth racing against the characters in this colourful and larger than life world. It was a place that infused his reality and gave him lots of happy memories to look back on.

It is this nostalgic place that he returns to in this book frequently as the poems take us through the various tracks and characters in the game. The fun though is short-lived, because all the way through, he has the agony of watching his mothers illness develop to the point where it finally claimed her.

For a collection of poems that leans heavily on gamer references about a fun thing to play, it is heavily draped with sorrow and grief. I liked the way that he varied the pace and structure of the poems, and having those two themes running all the way through, it builds into a narrative thread and feels like we are sharing his grief. Definitely one to read again one day.

Three Favourite Poems
Donut Plains 1
Chocolate Secret
#7 Larry’s Castle ( )