A Personal Poem About Chicago, and Other Abbreviations
by Eddie (Review)
It’s always so fascinating to witness the evolution of a creator as they
develop and grow into their work. I’ve been fortunate to be able to follow
and review this author’s work since his debut. The poems in those earlier
books were always charming and thrived with a hearty sense of humor
about life, but A Personal Poem About Chicago, with its far darker, cerebral
tone, is an astonishing, visionary collection – haunted, even. Haunted not by
ghosts coiling through the past, but living, breathing humans and the
injustices that continue to plague us.
Injustice is a key theme of this collection. Injustice can creep into any
aspect of life to spit in the face of what most consider to be the spectrum of
good and evil, but the most insidious thing about injustice is how often we
cause it to happen to ourselves. A Personal Poem opens on this somber note
with “Life Story”, about a man misspending his life due to a lack of
imagination and never straying from the expected “norm”.
Eddie’s style of prose is fast-paced and leans towards traditional, but isn’t
afraid of experimentation either. There is a wealth of dark, creative energy
and many genuine moments of self-re*ection, often traipsing into the
philosophical – the choices of viciousness and kindness, greed and charity,
brutality and sel*essness we make that change the entire course of life and
death across the planet.
A Personal Poem heavily critiques closed-mindedness, cruelty and bigotry
as “matters of convenience”, painful cycles that only continue to revolve
because no one will do enough to slow them, or at their worst, grow to enjoy
them. Personally, my favourite poems were on the dark underbelly of
human nature, from the dreamlike “Aria” to the more socially critical
“Stigma”. “Diechotomy” and “Negative Image (Rain Upon the Ocean” make
a crucial point, in that the nature of cruelty is to disguise itself, and the faces it wears are not only human, but can be an uncanny mirror of our
own.
I would give this collection a concrete 2ve out of 2ve stars. It’s dark,
metaphysical, yet sympathetic and mature. Sorrows and evils that are hard
to stomach are brought to the surface to where they can be made sense of –
put to rest, in a way. This is my own interpretation, at least. A Personal
Poem shows so much promise from this poet as well, and I hope that they
continue to write such poignant, amazing work.
This book is available for purchase on