The majority of this collection of Matt Buonocore’s poems are themed around love and relationships, renouncing old ties of a child to their parents for the love and support of an adult companion, and the relationship to that companion through thick and thin.

The poems each begin on a new page with titles in enlarged header text at the top although there is an oddity on page twelve, ‘The Truth of It’, where the title is not correctly aligned. Centering the text for every poem is an unusual formatting choice, but one that is not overly distracting. The Table of Contents is at the front, and while not linked to the Kindle Menu it does link to each poem for ease of reference. Alas, there is no return link from the poem, but no one is perfect.

Some of these poems are to be fair, rants against life that put me in mind of teen writings, such as Dear Mother, a poem that reads like a slammed door, albeit a well-deserved one. However when he hits the mark, Matt Buonocore can hit hard. Back to Life can be read with an implication of child loss that makes it heartbreaking. Whether it was his intention or not, I salute him for it.

The poems are freestyle, but Mr. Buonocore uses cadence and rhyme or quasi-rhyme throughout for emphasis which creates a lyrical feel to the prose which is utterly lacking in many modern poems. However that is not always a benefit when it comes at the cost of audience or sense. Some language had me reaching for a dictionary, such as the lovely phrasing: ‘sooth is truth’ which is lyrical but can mean either ‘real is truth’ or ‘smooth is truth’. In context, neither truly fit within the poem. I have never seen ‘reniform’ (def. shaped like a kidney, adj.) used in a poem before and again, in the context, it makes no sense.

I find that as I grow old I have less tolerance for spelling mistakes. In same cases punctuation is simply missing, such as page 7’s use of “deaths[sic] persuasion”. While the abbreviation of words, such as e’en for even, is a staple of poetry, simply missing punctuation can be distracting. I found no other such examples, so I may be being unreasonably fussy to highlight this.

While this is not a collection I would have picked up, it is not one I regret reading. It is good to see rhyme and cadence in effective use, and an expanded vocabulary, even if the poems themselves are not ones that I would long remember.

Reader of Matt Buonocore’s poetry should get this collection for completion’s sake if nothing more. Other poetry readers should consider it while it is free as a chance to decide if his other works are for you.