Dying. Being queer. Loving. These sharply beautiful and painful poems are excellent. ( )

Perhaps 4.5? This was a fantastic book of poems! Andrea Gibson really cuts to the point with a lyrical acumen. Each of these poems provoked lots of thought, regardless if it was a single sentence, a single stanza, or several pages long.

I knew when I kept seeing and loving their spoken word poetry on IG that I had to get a copy of one of their poetry books and I will definitely be picking up more. Highly recommend! ( )

It wasn't until I read 'Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die By Suicide' with tears in my eyes (I was a queer youth, after all) followed by 'No Such Thing as the Innocent Bystander' that I realised this poetry wasn't just magical, it was also extremely powerful. Before I hit these poems in particular, I wondered if Gibson was prone to letting their poems sometimes disintegrate towards the end in a way that made me wish they were tightened up a little more, and it took me a few poems to realise this is intentional, and they start off coherent and then spill into raw emotion in a way that's like a gift. (Some are extremely tight as well, don't get me wrong, this isn't an 'every poem' thing, just a 'some of them' thing).

So grateful to Button Books for the review copy, because this is a new author to me, in Western Australia, and I've needed poetry like this. I think any queer person, any nonbinary person, any gender-diverse person would, but so would any person who cares about justice, and time, and love, and heartbreak, and chronic illness. There's a lot of stand out moments here, a lot of them, from the declaration in that intent title, to the dreamlike cover, to the poems which start out as a story and end up bleeding the truth in sentence fragments and emotional raw wounds laced with so much hope.

I'm the kind of reader that automatically starts unconsciously assigning stars when I first start reading. I hovered on four stars, and then shot right past five and am now annoyed I can't actually force Goodreads to assign more, lol. Love this treasure trove, and will be rereading it going into the future. ( )

Stand-out poem I will return to - Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die By Suicide' ( )

Captures the true notion of growing up queer and the uncertain events that come with adulthood. This is one of the first books Ive read where I saw my own gender indentity written into poems. Furthermore, written into poems that focused on the serenity that comes with finding yourself. ( )