Book Review: Before the Blooming

Blurb:

  

“Before the Blooming is a collection of seven years of poetry that truly show the experience of being alive through eight unique sections, Love, Lust, Life, Nature, Religion, Fantasy, Darkness & Death, and Etc. Before the Blooming discusses all aspects of living through the use of poetry. The good times, and the bad. Because in the end, everything, is an experience.”

 Review:

The Piano Girl

I know a girl

Whose fingers dance among the ivories

She stays there all day

All night

Into the morrow she plays,

A personal songbird

Her proper soul plays as if she’s carefree

All her notes are lighthearted

But this girl is cursed

Her heart dances when she plays

So she plays,

And plays

Always playing…

Doomed to never stop

For once the music ends,

And the dancing ceases,

Its’ back to painful reality

Her true love is gone

Her keys will remain sear

As long as she plays,

Mind consumed by notes and melodies,

It has no room for his name

She plays until her fingers bleed

All her keys are red

Still she’s playing

Keeping memories at bay with her song

She prays inside

He will follow home her melodies

The notes are all for him

Before the Blooming, pg. 51-52

Before the Blooming is a collection of poetry representing seven years of a young woman's life. Poems are ordered by topic, and cover a wide range of subjects: life and death, love and loss, serious and whimsical. The spirit of the volume is transformative, demonstrating growth at the endurance of life's painful lessons, and also hopeful.

I'll confess, I don't know a great deal about poetry. I'm driven to write other things, and usually with a great deal more wordiness than a mere poem could hope to contain. That said, I enjoyed browsing through Bree Felling's compendium a great deal. There is a lot to like, including a lovely cover showing a tender blossom in the dirty hands of a gardener.

As a mother, this nurturing image corresponds to how I often feel about my own children—as caretaker and protector. (Of course, at other times I am a zookeeper and the warden of an insane asylum.) It varies with the day of the week and the moon cycle...

Bree fully manages to capture the trials and tribulations of feminine youth. She pours her heart into her poetry and takes the reader along on an empathetic journey. She portrays the people in her life with passion, and my mind's eyes painted a portrait of the individuals she wrote about. In particular, "The Piano Girl" resonated with me, leaving me with a vivid mental image and a profound sense of melancholy.

My orderly tendencies wanted to regroup the poems chronologically instead of categorically in order to make the journey linear, but I can understand why the poet chose as she did to go with broad categories instead of a well-ordered progression. Emotions, like life, are seldom neat.

I would have liked to see a bit more done with the formatting—poems run onto more than one page, leaving a lot of white space that could have been used more efficiently. Also, I wanted more pictures, because for me, poetry and pictures go hand in hand. The volume does contain the occasional small image but it would have benefited from the inclusion of photographs or drawings.

Before the Blooming is a wonderful reading choice for anyone who enjoys poetry and wishes to reconnect with a young woman's journey to adulthood.

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 Buy Links:

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Author Spotlight: Bree Felling

Please tell us about yourself and your writing.

Hello! My name is Bree Felling, Poet, Spoken Word artist and author of “Before the Blooming”. I started writing poetry frequently around age 10, I had also experimented writing novels but I never ended up finishing them, I seemed to speak my mind best through poetry.  In my teens it was more of a therapy for me, a quick and easy way to write what I was feeling at exactly that time, it was a challenge to myself to describe my life at the time in the least amount of words possible. I want to be able to say the words and thoughts people are afraid to say out loud and admit them to themselves. I want someone to read my work and be able to say “This is exactly how I’m feeling right now, these are the words I’ve been trying to say”. 

I actually never had any intention of publishing any of my work. The thought had never crossed my mind, it was always more of a personal therapy session for me. Later on I suffered a bad case of writers block, but met someone who helped me get over it. I began to be able to write again, and started experimenting with ‘spoken word’ instead of poetry after I was introduced to it in college. I found an open mic café in the town beside me and decided to go one night. I decided that the next Friday I was going to begin performing my work. It was time the world knew what I had to say. Now I’m also working on my next collection of poetry, and an adult poetry book as well.

 But aside from writing I’ve always been a very creative and “fashion forward” person. I’ve always released my inner artist by messing around with crazy makeup looks, weird hair colors, colored contacts and outfits. I always thought life was too short to look the same every day. I’ve always loved pushing boundaries and re-defining normality, both in my life, and my writing.

What inspired your current book?

 I don’t think I could have found any other title better then “Before the Blooming”. I chose this title because that’s exactly what the book was for me, a printed version of the growth process that I went through in my life, and as a writer. I left the dates intact for most of the poems, it lets you know how old I was while reading, so you can literally see the growth as a person and a poet. The poetry inside was everything I dealt with between ages 10 to about 18. The loss, the depression and my thoughts; but also my happiness, my joy, and creative thinking.

Blurb:

  

“Before the Blooming is a collection of seven years of poetry that truly show the experience of being alive through eight unique sections, Love, Lust, Life, Nature, Religion, Fantasy, Darkness & Death, and Etc. Before the Blooming discusses all aspects of living through the use of poetry. The good times, and the bad. Because in the end, everything, is an experience.”

Find Bree on the Internet:

Website   Facebook   Twitter   

 Buy Links:

Amazon Kindle

Amazon Paperback

Bree Felling Lulu Bookstore

National Sexual Assault Awareness Month

Today I'm posting in support of National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. This is a video called "Stout Words" by Jodi Martinez, featuring poet Bree Felling.



To learn more, please visit the official website.