This book, What She Feels, by Chidozie Osuwa is composed of a collection of poems. From the first couple of pages, I already immediately fell in love. Right off the bat, multiple poems were for the most part relateable; It was as if Osuwa was writing my thoughts onto paper and converting my feelings into words.
Each poem seemed to connect with the underlying topic of relationships—the dealing with difficulties and/or brokenness that comes during, or as a result of, being in a rather complicated relationship. The writer was consistent with this theme throughout the book.
Structurally, the book is split into about three parts. The first 95 pages are individual poems under the chapter, “SHE SAID-,” the following page covering a single poem, under, “HE SAID-,” and the rest of the pages are independent poems that aren’t technically categorized under any specific chapter.
In the first chapter, my personal favorite, “SHE SAID-“,” the pages are structured with a first-person point-of-view poem displayed on the top half of each page with a few lines of prose below, relating to the text above. I found this feature to be neat as one can get more context on the poem in addition to their own initial take on it.
On the other hand, the, “HE SAID,” section simply involved a single, two-lined poem. I honestly thought this section would feature content similar to, and as plentiful as its former.
Alternatively, the remaining set of poems was not placed under one classified section, but they do follow the same layouts. Each of these seems to display snippets of scenarios, in an omnipotent matter, and the last word or so of each line rhymed with the previous/following line. All of these poems were about a page and a half each, without a statement provided underneath for extra content.
For me, out of the whole collection, I thoroughly enjoyed the section, “SHE SAID-“—not that the other sections weren’t well written; Respectively, all of the poems had their own enjoyable qualities and stories behind them. Personally for me, however, I just related significantly more to the poems in the first half of the book.
As I mentioned earlier, I have thoroughly enjoyed the majority of this poetry book. Hypocritically, though, the only issue I had were typos I spotted on a couple of pages in the beginning. They don’t take away from the poem’s too much, but as I am very observant about small details like these, they were the slightest bit bothersome to me, as I would have expected someone to go over these before publishing the book—but then again, everyone makes mistakes, and it’s easy for small things like these to slip!
Despite the minor errors I found, I would recommend this to others (in fact, I actually already have done so to a friend, and she fell in love with it from just the first couple of pages, like I did) due to how relateable I found these poems to be, in addition to how nice each page and each chapter is structured.
Those I would recommend it to would be those who in the past have been, or even currently are, dealing with issues in their relationship, or especially even just those going through a breakup. Ideally, teens, young adults, and middle-age adults alike will find this to their forte.
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