Wild Embers by Kikita Gill

Rated: 3.5 Stars

Read: 2018

Edition: Paperback (1st Ed.)

Published: Hachette Books (November 14, 2017)

Strength, rebellion, beauty, and resilience are clearly there. Without question, Gill writes from the heart and with passion. Her renditions of the Disney princesses and the Greek goddesses were absolute gems that I had to read out loud for my brother and sisters. These were more like prose in form, they’re something else, though I felt some were a tad too romanticized, like Athena, which isn’t necessarily bad.

Via TWO CATS AND A LITTLE HOUSE

On the whole, I think it’s a pretty neat book. It’s a slim volume, has over a hundred individual poems. However, while each and every poem has merit, some were better articulated than others.

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Fiction (?): Skin

I’m backed into the damned corner. Again. Not a physical corner formed by the union of two solid walls. The place in my mind, it’s a black dusty mine that waits for a gap in my happiness so I might fall into it. Haplessly, I do arms around my knees and head tucked in. My sooty lungs press hard against rib cages not built to take the rpm of my beating heart.

I am not nice. I do not belong the name “Mia”. I am not the scarred brown skin that thinly veils my continued existence. I am not the tentative smile centered by two brown eyes.

I am a dark night dappled in stars, covered in howling wind and cold rain like hard fingers.

Sometimes I am the words I read, the shows I watch, a part of a far flung community of inside jokes.

Mostly though, i am the banshee heralding my own demise. That wretched woman who screams and screams that falls on deaf ears of the living. The things she knows about the all things she does not, insanity. Wailing wailing waling, unnoticed by passersby caught up in their own affairs. 

i … i am lost among people who love me. i, who know not how to pull off the leaches that suck the light out of me, surely do not deserve that warmth nor can carry that weight of it.

There is a silent horror that lives behind the eyes of the tortured, i’ve come to know. It’s masked by a habitual tiredness.

Horror birthed from dark seeds, physical and mental trauma are it’s famous progeny. Little fears of mundane objects is the stealthy child.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

via Goodreads

Rated: 4.5 stars

Blurb

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host, Jay Gatsby, a flamboyant but reserved self-made man with murky business interests and a shadowy past. As the two men strike up an unlikely friendship, details of Gatsby’s impossible love for a married woman emerge, until events spiral into tragedy.

Regarded as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of American literature, The Great Gatsby is a vivid chronicle of the excesses and decadence of the “Jazz Age”, as well as a timeless, cautionary critique of the American dream.

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I didn’t think I’d like this as much as I’d previously thought, the classics genre often hint to a bore of a book, often but not always. The Great Gatsby is, in short, a tragic love story and you’ll find here that a woman can spell ruin for a man, not that it’s news. I can see why many before me consider this a great book. Fitzgerald captured a drop of human nature during the time of easy money and high living in beautiful prose.