The poetry in this book is incredibly personal and important. I think everyone needs to read this in order to understand that even if people are against us we need to stand up and fight. And we'll continue to do so until people realize that we're all equals and every single one of us matter.

I enjoyed bits of this, but sometimes flat out felt like I wasn't the right audience for it. I think this book will do well with preteens and young teens, but not many other people.

This poetry is so gut-wrenching and emotional. I laughed and cried. I was inspired and moved. I felt Amanda's pain and power through the words. I adored the majority of the poems in here and I loved how they were interconnected. I read this all in one sitting.. This is what poetry is all about.

Okay, I've had enough of this.

i've
had
enough
of
this.

enough
is
enough
is
enough

I'm not going to live long enough to read everything on my TBR list. Ergo, I neither have to soldier through this one and work myself into a frothing rage over what qualifies as (Goodreads) award-winning poetry these days. In fact, I'm gonna do myself a favour and avoid anything that Goodreads members pick as "award winning".

did
not
finish

- i got other books waiting

Reading copy courtesy of NetGalley.

This book is a heart wrenching insight into the authors life. And I'm sure, will feel like an arrow to the heart to the many readers that can relate to it. A modern take on the poetic form, I thoroughly devoured these poems and will happily purchase a hardcopy so for me to truly get the most out of these words.
Each poem that resonated me felt both like a relief and a sucker-punch all at once. A truly great read.

This book is filled with beautiful poems that make you feel something. It reminded me in a way of Milk and Honey another poetry complication split into sections that I read this year and enjoyed very much as well. Highly recommend this to anyone new to poetry or who already loves the art form. It's a fast read with a lot of meaning and you can tell everything is personal but everyone can relate to the poems in some form even if they haven't experienced the exact same thing.

I'm starting to read more poetry. This was a good choice. What a title, by the way!

I enjoyed reading free verse poetry but unfortunately, this book didn't worked out that good for me. Some of the poems/prose were good but most of them felt flat. There was even one that I didn't understand at all. I'll probably appreciate this book more if I'm younger. The poems I loved were the book-themed ones and also the dedication. The author shared her own personal experiences and all the stuff she went through and I totally admire her for that.

This was such an empowering collection of poems. It was brutal, honest and deeply personal.

Watching Amanda Lovelace reclaiming her body scar by scar and fingerprint by fingerprint felt as I was in a room as black as the collection’s cover, sitting in a circle with fellow sufferers, listening to each of Lovelace’s doubts, not- good-enough’s and moments of intense self-starvation peel off like layers of burnt skin. This was not a comfortable collection but it was a necessary one.

There is a void in feminist poetry in which Lovelace masterfully pours this collection. Whilst other poems are off lamenting the treatment of women’s bodies and demanding equality, Lovelace is saving us all by teaching us how to save ourselves. She urges us not just to peel back the blanket we’ve cocooned ourselves in and peer outside at the injustices but to get out and dig in the dirt with our fingernails to find the pieces of ourselves that we have buried. She teaches us to wear the dirt like armour.

I have never read a poetry collection which so fully owns itself. It held me like a fist from cover to cover.

Read it. Then read it again. Then give it to someone else who needs it.

It seems like most people either hate this or love it, and I'm in the middle I have never read much poetry or been very interested in it. What grabebed my attention was the title I have also seen and liked some of the poems, so when I saw it on NetGalley I was excited for the chance to read it. A lot of the people who dislike this say it's not read poetry and just something you'd see on tumblr I'm not well versed in poetry so I'm not going to talk much about the structure of it. What I will say is that you shouldn't let your dislike of the style keep you from appreciating the meaning of what's being said and how raw it is.

I knew I was going to read this fast but I read it faster than I was expecting it only took me like forty minutes to read and that was with me rereading and taking screenshots of the poems I liked. The poems are just so short and simple like I said some of them are meaningful but sadly not as many as I was expecting and a lot of them especially in the you section are variations of lines I've seen a dozen times around the internet others were just cliche or I simply didn't like them much. I wish I had liked it more and been able to give it a higher rating nonetheless I'm glad I read it.

I picked this up because I'd been hearing a lot of chatter about it. This won the Goodreads award for poetry and, as some who occasionally reads volumes of poetry, I was interested. I have given this collection a rating of 2/5 because whilst the poems were evocative, they simply did not work for me. Through no fault of the author, as this is clearly a highly personal collection and appears to me to perhaps be part of a cathartic process for her, I found many of the poems to not be particularly relatable.

The Princess Saves Herself In This One is a highly personal collection of poems divided into four parts: the princess, the damsel, the queen, and you. It incorporates themes of family, love, grief, anger, growing up, and healing. It is a highly emotional and impacting read, and I am certain that many of these poems will resonate with a great many people.

It is unfortunate then that my first emotional response to this collection was annoyance. The style of poetry has a great deal of line breaks, which I initially found frustrating to read. I am not an expert poetry critic, nor am I going to say that I don't think her style is "real poetry" (because I absolutely do not think that), but I didn't enjoy it. Most of these poems are essentially long train-of-thought sentences with every other word on a new line. For example:

he
did not
teach me
how
to love
myself,

I did not particularly enjoy this style.

However, I did quickly become accustomed to the formatting and once I moved past this I found myself enjoying and connecting more with the poetry. Emotionally, I found that my younger self had much to relate to in the first section, the princess, which explores the author's experience of being a young girl lost in problems of identity. Again, I would have found this collection immensely helpful and encouraging when I was younger. The second section, the damsel, jumped between poems about first loves, her mother, death and loss. There was a lot of raw pain and anger here, which was an interesting insight into the author. My favourite poem was found here:

you will think
your parents are
s h a t t e r p r o o f
until one day
you find out
t h e y a r e n ' t
The queen was about recovery, about becoming more than your past. The final section, You, I didn't really understand to be perfectly frank. The poems were eclectic and varying in theme.

Poetry is uniquely subjective. And unfortunately this collection did not work for me. I read it in under 40 minutes. I felt no desire to savour it; possibly because the poems were so short, possibly because they were so deeply personal to the poet that I felt uncomfortable. I gave this collection two stars because it is not bad poetry, in fact in some places it is rather good: it was emotional, there are clear emerging themes, strong recurring images. I liked and appreciated the overall fairytale narrative arc of the princess emerging from her past to become a queen, growing strong and healing. But I disliked the form, the use of cliches, and generally did not relate much to the themes. Whilst the poetry was not to my flavour, I would recommend it to a teenage reader due to the themes, or just someone who really loves free verse poetry.

I got through these poems on my commute to and from classes tonight, which says something about how easily they read. It also ended up being an indicator of how well the mind retained them and what specifically it retained, which ended up, for the most part, being only fragments that I considered most problematic.

"The Princess Saves Herself in This One" sets out with good intentions - to act as a source of motivation for the reader, to share the speaker's (which I think is also the author's) story, and to spread female empowerment - all of which are valid. But I could barely get past the same, cliche princess in the tower scenario to feel the impact of most of these pieces, and the ones that I did feel struck me as problematic. For I found the tone of some of the poems to be preachy and slightly egoistic, pushing me away emotionally because I just couldn't agree with them. The two that stuck out the most was a piece that talked about how it's not you who's wrong but society, to which a response instantly arose: but WE are a collective society, every single individual, including myself and the author. And one must consider how we act within this society, whether we're trying to spread a healthy kind of encouragement or one that is liberal bordering on ridiculous. The other was a piece about how, just because a woman's body is capable of having children, she doesn't need to have them. And I know the speaker was talking about herself here, but I just took that one personally. This points to how careful one must be with arguments and statements. Yes, I know the speaker was talking about herself and her point of view, but given the tone of the collection and its aim I think it's fair to say that it tries to be personal, so when it becomes negatively personal it cannot be dismissed.

I didn't think the use of the princess and dragon metaphor was suitable either. We've gotten so hung up, I feel, with using this analogy, and trying to take ideas such as a princess becoming a queen in order to exemplify a freedom gained by the girl as she matures. Perhaps if we strayed from these familiar tropes and looked for comparisons elsewhere, carving, as so many like to argue, a new pathway through literature in the 21st century, then maybe people would refer less to the damsel-princess stereotype for girls because it would finally be seen as an outdated form of thinking. The same can be applied to the use of cliche images when talking about boys with messy hair and green eyes, or the language used when moping over a boy (for that is what this was). That mentality needs to change, or some effort should at least be made to change it, before we can make progress and move forward.

The content overall wasn't helped by the style of the poems, which felt like a random use of the Enter key to create an illusion of sentences as something poetic beyond their simple imagery and equally simplistic observations. Some will love these poems because of how simple and "down-to-earth" they are in the poetry genre, but these poems demands to be felt with a blind and obsessive kind of approach rather than asking the reader to think more into the imagery and metaphors. These poems felt like the literary equivalent of licorice as opposed to the Lindor chocolate of some other poems like Jamaal May, Louise Gluck, and Robin Richardson, to name a few. They're for the people who enjoy digging up the emotional pasts of themselves along with the speaker and trying to match the shreds and marvel over the similarity. For me it was a very surface level of poetry that, like contemporary art, tends to test the patience and really push the boundary of when something is called poetry and when it's trying to be something it really isn't.

There are different ways of dealing with the happiness and sorrow in our lives. "The Princess Saves Herself in This One" is virtually a personal journal that has been published and has thus gained its acclaim because of how naked it is in its use of language, it's use of striking through words about as complex as it gets in terms of style. For some, this is great, especially for those who see poetry as a way of extracting sensation and elation above all else. But I know there are poets who manage to weave beautiful words with equally powerful emotions - those poets are out there. And given how much I adored Jamaal May's collection that was also published in 2016, it makes me quite sad that it wasn't even nominated, whereas this won the prize. The style and content of these poems are an indicator of where society is going, and points more than ever to the divide that exists even within something like literature, which some argue is the perfect way for objectivity to be reached. All I knew was that I wasn't a princess nor did I want to be a part of the princess saving herself and becoming a queen trope. This is something that should be addressed more, for to truly combat these issues one actually has to begin changing them, not making the illusion of change.

This poetry book is phenomenal. I'm not usually a fan on poetry, however I follow Amanda Lovelace on a lot of social media and had scene a lot of her poetry before so I decided to give it a chance. Let me tell you, this book honestly changed me. The raw emotion that I could feel is something so rare. Amanda is so brave for sharing this part of her life with everyone and I have so much respect. Even though I could not personally relate to every poem in this book, I still felt like I could understand them and felt a strong emotional connection to the author and each individual poem. I would 100% recommend this book to EVERYONE, in fact I have recommended it to many people in my life. You can connect to this at any age and any point in your life. Truly a masterpiece.

A mixed bag - found some moments that I absolutely loved, but the repetitive format did start to grate on me.

What a beautiful book. The vision of the words on every page drew me in to your tale, and brought tears to my eyes. I hope to continue to see more of your writing. I've been following you on tumblr and was thrilled to get a chance to read your book. Fantastic!

THIS. I haven't read poetry in years and then comes THIS and it sweeps me off my feet.

It is so emotional, real and raw while tackling a whole bunch of important issues but most importantly and what impacted me the most is the self-love message that it conveys. Most poems revolve around that.
What is striking as well is that the poems have a kind of chronology to them so while they each are independent, they are part of a bigger story, a story of loss, love, grief and getting back up after a hard fall.

Some of them were so relatable that it got overwhelming, I cried reading some and reflecting on my own experiences and how perfectly the poems sum them up. Everyone should read this collection of poems, it is so beautiful. I personally think that the bast way to read it is to savour it, I read it over the course of a few days while I know I could've finished it in an hour or two.

READ IT.

Amanda Lovelace somehow did the impossible…she made me fall in love with poetry. I really enjoyed reading into her life, and silently rooting for her the whole way. Her story is a life that starts out hopeless and very, very sad, but it later blossoms and grows into a life worth living – a happy one, all about YOUR(her)SELF. Her story is so relatable, and can reach so many people who struggle with similar issues. All you have to do is read this book, and you’ll know that, despite everything, you will eventually be okay.

I love her style – she writes a poem that is then followed by a short sentence, either summarizing the above poem or driving home a hard point. I think this is so creative and inventive, and I was blown away by how she used this structure.

This was much better than I expected, if I'm being honest. Short bursts of poetry tell a running narrative over the course of the pages, covering loss, grief, love and more. Don't let the snobbery in other reviews put you off. Writing, like all art, is subjective and the meaning of poetry covers a wide range, despite some reviewers wanting to keep it within a very narrow category. Overall, the work was raw at times, poignant at others and a really satisfying emotional read.