Book Review: "Forgive Yourself: These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction" by Jared Singer

"Goodbyes

are exactly like that—

no matter how ready you think

you are for them,

they always leave you with so

many things you want to say."

Reading this book wasn't what I expected. I know that reading someone else's poetry you enter in a part of their soul that is not always available to anyone else. Poetry can get very personal. It's not only a writing genre where you put words together to make them rhyme, but it's also a process where you express what you can't say with your voice in a certain moment, and I feel this process is different than writing a diary because mind and heart look for the correct words or even invent them to capture them on a piece of paper to never let them go.

Jared Singer talks about different kinds of love: the one that is romantic, the one that comes from friendship, the one that comes with one's identity and culture and self-love but also about their counterparts, like a partners' loss because love is gone, the loss of friends due to suicide or hate crimes, the loss of one's self, which happens often and can involve any of the aforementioned losses and, therefore, the need of self-destruction as well as the path to acceptance.

I'd say "TOXICITY" and "I STILL MISS YOU" were poems that felt like a bunch of slaps because they reminded me of myself. And that's the thing about poetry that differs from characters in novels. Even though these aren't your words, you can find your feelings finally expressed and that you are not the only one that thinks the same.

The only one I disagreed with was "YOUR SLEEPING PILLS." Didn't I get the point of it? Maybe. But as someone that has been in treatment for months, I can't tell myself that I don't need them. Of course, my body and mind would love not to take them, that I'd be better off without them in a certain way, but taking those pills is something that I need to get used to since what I have is not something that will ever end. Still, even with those pills, I do have those moments of self-destruction (you need to read the poem to understand such moments).

I could read this book thanks to NetGalley and Button Poetry ;)

JARED SINGER is an audio engineer and poet currently living in New Jersey. He grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and came to maturity in Brooklyn. This life has taught Jared that both beauty and hardship will find us wherever we go, and cannot hide from either. What we can do is choose which we look for and which we focus our life around. Jared is proud to have his poems focused on joy, science, and learning from his worst moments.