The Lioness Awakens: Poems

by Lauren Eden

Book Overview

The Lioness Awakens is an illustrated work of short poems with a bite. Lauren Eden writes provocative poetry about love, sexuality, heartbreak, and feminism, combined in a creative expression of female empowerment and confidence...

I was always
suspicious of those
Happily Ever Afters
disappearing without a trace
with no other pages as evidence.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250208726
• ISBN13: 9781250208729
• Release Date: November 2018
• Publisher: Castle Point Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Good intro to poetry collection

This is a poetry collection for a woman who doesn't like poetry. (Very specifically this collection is written by a woman for women, and though the book lacks an author's statement, I would guess Lauren doesn't really want men reading this anyways.) Or a good introduction to poetry, poetry collection. These poems are very direct, written in plain English with very few creative poetic flourishes. "a woman gave me life / and men / have been trying / to kill me / ever since." ("Paranoid", 5) For people unused to poetic conventions these poems would be more accessible than traditional poetry. I, however, find those poetic flourishes that often obscure the meaning of a poem beautiful and found myself missing them greatly while reading this collection. The clear messaging of these poems is refreshing in a way though and also valuable despite not being my genre preference. I purchased and read this collection solely because of one poem I had seen about it online. That poem is "Starved" from page 50; "When you are not fed love on a silver spoon you learn to lick it off knives." While I am glad I know the context of this quote that has intrigued me for a long time, I was a bit disappointed to find that quote is the poem's entirety. After reading the complete collection, I think many of the poems feel similarly short or perhaps even unfinished. Many of these 'poems' are really thoughtful pieces of commentary on women, society, etc., but they didn't feel like poems to me, they felt like disjointed thoughts. I did particularly reading the poem "Starved" in conjunction with the later poem "Gold". I only connected them because of their references to gold and silver, but they still pair nicely in my brain. The poems in this collection take two distinct forms. The first is short and highly enjambed poems, like the quintessential Rupi Kaur poem. Though Lauren Eden's enjambment and brevity are considerably less extreme than Rupi's. The second structure Lauren uses is much longer prose-style poems, these poems only have stanza breaks where traditional paragraph breaks would occur in the prose. It's my personal opinion that these are two fairly boring ways of structuring poems and by being limited to these two forms Lauren's poems become monotonous by the end of the collection. I would also say that I think these forms are most often used by untrained poets, which surprises me given this is not Lauren's first collection. In addition to the poems I've already quoted, stand-outs in this collection are "Debt", "Armor", "Quick Fixes", "Tangled", "Together", "Half-Caf", "Light", "Fed", "Spotlight", "Cloth", and "Belief". While it is normal for me to select my favorite poems while reading, for the first time ever this book moved me to select my least favorite poems. Gladly there were fewer least favorites than favorite, but least favorite is a misnomer, these poems are poems I found to be so bad I can't even believe someone chose to write them. There are 9 of these poems in this collection and they increase in frequency the further you get into the collection. While not my favorite or least favorite poems, I wanted to note the poems "Heard" and "Written" as poems of particular interest. I think they are two of the poems with the clearest feminist messaging. They are both about, what I would consider a universal woman's experience that is all but impossible to explain to a man, and though this collection is not for men, I think they are written in a way even men would understand.

Incredibly powerful.

Powerful poetry for women.