Book Rating: ★★★★✰ (4 / 5 stars)
A wonderful collection of dark poetry, we delve in Jennifer Hudgen’s mind and soul. There is a sort of narrative going on throughout the entire collections: about an individual struggling to find purpose in life, family, school, etc. In such a collection, you search for these similarities, and whether the author is intentional or not, you put them together into a sort of story.
Of all the poems, the one that stuck the most with me is the second one in the collection, Holes. There was something picturesque but dark about this poem, while also being creepy. It transplants you in the arms of a killer, digging a hole…reflecting on life. While it’s dark and macabre, it also a moment of understanding.
Ultimately, How We Met with Our Ghosts is a dark but beautiful collection of poems. Definitely worth reading, whether it’s just one poem or many.
What’s it about?
“In this collection, Jennifer Hudgens dares to haunt the ghost back, and does so with measured calm and electric narrative. Longing manifests into a tangible and languid thing inside these poems – and everything is alive in the haunting: the slow stretch of bruised childhood, the complicated relationship with grief and the ones left behind in its shadow, a few unlucky highway deer, the Oklahoma ground in summer – all ghosts Hudgens introduces to us with flowing imagery and more than a little bite. These are the kinds of poems that make a nest of you, a delicate and mutable possession. You won’t regret inviting her inside.” – Melissa May-Dunn
E.S. Barrison 