Beau Sia

Beau Sia's back with another great poetry collection. His first book, A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge, was funny and perverted. This book is not quite the same. There are no dick jokes in this book. Okay, maybe one dick joke. But not very many. He still writes about sex, but in a way that suggests he's done some reading on feminist rhetoric. There are a lot of political poems about race, about the family unit, about looking back at your past self. Sia has clearly matured as a writer, and it shows in his work. His style is less sparse than before; he uses repetition and does a few neat artistic things with line breaks. I enjoyed this book. My attention did start to wane after a while, and I got bored by the last few pages which is why I gave it four stars instead of fine. Still, this is a good book, and I recommend everyone to go out and buy a copy because this guy knows how to write.… (meer)

This book is a parody of Jewel's book A Night Without Armor. I've never read the book by Jewel, but I've been wanting to read this book by Beau Sia ever since I heard about it by reading Alloy Book's Slam collection in middle school. So when I finally managed to get my hand on a copy, I was pretty happy.

It's a short read, only 115 pages, and quite a few of those pages are illustrations or short poems. Most of the poems are about having sex, wanting to be famous, hating some random fat woman, and mocking his gothic sister. But I liked it anyway. It was honest. What writer doesn't want to be rich? I got the feeling a lot of the poems were made up in order to fit with the titles Jewel had originally come up with, but I liked not knowing what was real and what wasn't.… (meer)