Glass Hearts and Broken Promises

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There were several poems I did like in this book. I think the author has potential, but this collection was not my favorite collection in terms of poetry. I’d spent forever waking up beside you. Learning the way you liked your coffee. Listening to what brought you joy in this world and consoling you when things didn’t go as planned. It was brutal letting all that go. I was suspended in a future that I thought we both had wanted and now that that’s gone (111) I continued loving you despite knowing that you didn’t deserve me. I kept supporting you thinking that you were going to change I made excuses for the relationship thinking that it was going to be different this time around but it wasn’t because I couldn’t make you choose me or want me or even remember me when I was gone (89) I don’t remember what you look like anymore. It hurts for me to admit that I close my eyes and I think I see you. I see your face and your hair. I see you sitting there on your couch reading a book or watching a movie but I don’t actually see you (39) If this is not the case, and I'm simply hallucinating, then to that I say, other poets have written about heartbreak before and been more relatable to me, or I believe their poems were a little wittier and a bit punchier compared to this collection.

Glass Hearts and Broken Promises by Kayla McCullough is a collection of poetry about heartbreak and healing. It focuses on breakups, moving on, and self-love, and it does so in a very straightforward way. And second, some lines just don't really make sense. The logic is entirely missing, or at least a big enough part of it that I can't follow. Glass Hearts & Broken Promises does none of that, and that's a dealbreaker for me. There are certainly a lot of words associated with vulnerability (pain, broken, grief, miss, etc.) but they're all used so plainly that it's impossible to feel the full weight of them. Language that we're used to is language that becomes purely utilitarian and loses its punch, and that's the only language that's used in this book. After leaving high school, I kept a diary for a couple years because I was so heartbroken and lonely I didn't know where else to say it. Once, after several sleepless nights, I decided nothing else would convey my pain quite as well as poetry, and so of course I had to write a poem. I was 19, painfully naïve and inexperienced, writing in a language I wasn't really fluent in, drunk on tiredness, and hadn't written poetry since my high school literature teacher had us write one (1) poem when I was 15. Glass Hearts and Broken Promises by Kayla McCullough is a collection of poems split into “The Break” and “The Mend” where readers are bared to the soul of McCullough as she tells the story of heartbreak, love, etc. It was very obviously a work of her soul, and you can tell from the emotion that seeps from many of the poems.I trusted you when I shouldn’t have. I let you in to find comfort in a bed that should’ve never warmed your heart… You violated me. You betrayed the friendship I gave you. And the betrayal from that night has hung heavy in my heart and has clouded my mind (44) This was just not good. Someone must have broken the author's heart really badly and they must have put all their feelings into these poems, but in sense of poetry and literature this this book gave me nothing. I'm sorry your heart broke and I'm sure that someone who also got their heart broken could find some comfort from this book and reading about someone who relates, but other than that I don't have much positive to say. If what they were in was never love at all, then... they weren't actually in love? I don't know, this one confuses me. I’m not sure if this will ever stop hurting. If my tears will ever stop flowing or if I’ll ever stop waking up at 2 am searching for your body that should be next to mine (60)

Thank you to the publisher for providing an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. I thought of our very first fight. I thought of the way you yelled. I thought of the first time I caught you keeping secrets from me the things that you never told me but somehow, I already knew. The ones that made me feel worthless and unloved the ones that I pushed aside because I loved you… And then I thought of our last day together the last day we were two halves of the same whole the day we talked and cried as we agreed that this was the end (131) You had me believing that I meant more to you than what I actually did. You were always great at making me believe in lies (68) I made so many excuses for your behavior to the people I loved. I had wished away all the lies all the broken promises and I had put myself down to try and build you up (120)If someone’s already looking for a way out you can’t hold onto them. No matter how much you love them they won’t stay (124) Really? Trauma? For context, she doesn't describe anything actually bad, just as painful as hinted at by the sentence about the pictures documenting their falling out of love.) I would have been disappointed if that had been as bad as it got, but I might have nonetheless found some pleasure in that strange, sweet pain you get when reading about someone else's pain (or someone else working through their pain?). But even that was impossible, because I felt absolutely nothing.

First, some words are outrageously misused (especially "trauma" - never mind that that's entirely telling and not showing). As an example: I’m not sure how it happened when our love became hatred all I know is that right now I’m sitting here all alone without my friend or a love and a giant hole in my heart (20) Sometimes I wish you would have loved me like I loved you. love isn’t worrying about the other people they’re texting claiming that they’re just friends. So, if you would have loved me like I loved you I would’ve never learned that love was never you to begin with (134) I want to believe them when they say time heals your heartbreak but I can’t because I will always miss you and I will always love you and that heartbreak isn’t going anywhere. But that’s the thing with grief. Time may ease the pain but it’s never fully gone. I think about what life would have been like if you’d been there for me more (26)Here, however, it served absolutely no purpose. It didn't create any ambiguity and the line breaks didn't highlight anything or make it more poignant. There was no assonance, no rhythm created by line length or repetition - I even struggled to find a single metaphor, anaphora, oxymoron, or literally any other literary device. While I was holding onto you, you were letting me go. While I was fighting to keep everything together you didn’t care about staying and you decided to leave (64) But there was a part of me that wanted to see you again. A part of me that didn’t want the last time I saw you to have been the last time. I was hoping that there’d be a day where we’d finally see each other again and everything would finally feel right. We would finally make sense that when day came. It didn’t end the way I had imagined it (143)