The Universe of Us by Lang Leav | Review

Pages: 240

Genre: poetry

My thoughts

Rating out of five: three

This is the first time I’m reading Lang Leav’s poetry and my first impression was that she seemed like a good writer, I really liked the way the first poems flowed. The subjects of her poems in this collection, love and heartbreak, are so universal and relatable to many. But so many of the love poems seemed like a writer going through drafts trying to find the best description of love and then just throwing them all in here. Many were so similiar, and nothing very new at that, it was the same with the heartbreak poems.

I don’t think it helped that I disagreed with some of the opinions of the poems, like how we only get max a handful of firsts. I wouldn’t want to live my life like that, never experiencing new things as I’m becoming and living as an adult. In this minimal-type poetry, it’s easy that some poems become too … dark without explanation? As if it’s not taken the time to explain the depth of the feeling, to keep it relatable to many perhaps, but I’ve found I more often like poems to be specific. Without some more personal connection these poems describe these big concepts in life superficially.