I don't read much poetry, but found Lang Leav's collection refreshing and interesting to read. I enjoyed the theme of the sea, however I found it difficult to connect and stay connected - maybe I am just not a poetry person. Although I could appreciate that the poems were mostly good, it felt too consistently sad and slightly cliche for me.

I enjoyed the theme of sea, ocean and water in the poetry. I've come to realize that I do not love the modern poetry style and prefer classical ones with a rhyme scheme. So while I didn't like the writing style, if you enjoy contemporary poetry style, I'd recommend this book.

As everything Lang Leav writes when it comes to poetry, this was delightful! Her words give you a mix of emotions that literally take you into a sea of strangers where you, somehow, find yourself with forgotten past love stories and sorrowful memories. But, in the same way, it makes you feel this kind of fullness inside. It is a way of written music. Beautiful. Her style, for me, never gets old.

I've followed Lang Leav for years now and I've devoured all her poetry collections. With Sea of Strangers, Leav continues to provide us with beauty, resilience, heartbreak and resilience.

** 4 stars **

Opening Line
“It has been almost a decade since I wrote the poem Sea of Strangers.”


I love Lang Leav. Every time I'm about to read one of her books I select a mellow playlist on my iPod, make a cup of tea, and prepare myself for the raw emotions her poems always manage to draw out of me.

"It is the mark of a great poet to write words that feel as though they have stood witness to your most intimate memory of love."


Sea of Strangers was yet another compilation of poems about love, loss, heartbreak, and sadness. I know to expect this from Lang and unlike others it doesn't bother me. However, Sea of Strangers just didn't do it for me compared to all her previous works. That's not to say it wasn't a good read, I have about over 20 tabs in my copy that I bought. It just didn't vibe with me like her other poems in Love & Misadventure, Lullabies, Memories, or The Universe of Us.

Here's a list of some of my favourites from Sea of Strangers: ♥
Sea of Strangers
New Beginnings
Keys to the Kingdom
You Had Me Once
Witness
Reclaiming the Sky
Moving On
Into Existence
Where It Hurts
Take Back Your Power
Anything for Love
Falling into You
Meant to Be
September Love
Love Hurts
Sandcastle
Poetry and Prose
Goddess
More to Me
Letter by Letter
Too Far In
Borrowed Love
The Irony of Love
To Know
Transcript of Your Heart
Love What You Love
Whole Again

The evolution of Lang Leav and her writing is obvious in this book! Her poetry is amazing and I can't wait to see more of her

I have always loved Lang's poetry,Lang writes of love and loss, grief and healing, power .and weakness, and she switches flawlessly between poetry and prose.I do like the writing better in this collection than her previous work.There were many poems that I really liked 🙂 The underlying theme of this poetry collection is that of love and loss.

Aside from Lang Leav’s usual theme of poetry like love and heartbreak, this book has more poems about empowerment and self-discovery which I absolutely loved reading. This would probably be my favorite poetry collection of Lang Leav. Always looking forward to the next one!

There are people who want to live on the land and there are those who like to swim in the sea. There is another sort that likes to live on the seashore never to fully let the land suck them in and the sea to overpower them. This collection of poems are written for those who have lived through love and have survived as has the poet herself.

Love is not rosy. Lang Leav asks you to beware of the boy who has asked for your name. He is eventually going to break your heart.

If a boy asks you for your name, don’t give it to him. He will say it back to you in a voice like gravel and honey, and you will crave his hands all rough and sweet. But you’re not the kind of girl who builds her house from sticks; you are a fortress, stubborn and strong. Do not give away the keys to the kingdom to anyone less than a king.

Lang Leav talks about love. All kinds of love. Passionate and slowly consuming kind. She talks about loss. The sudden jerk and the one you cope up with even years after it has left you. And if you like the state of being in love she can also tell you something about contentment.

There was a time when I thought I wanted more. When I saw the sky as a soaring highway and the world as one big

carousel. But those yearnings have grown so distant, ebbed so far away from me, they feel as though they belong to

someone else. All I want now is a rainy day, a roaring fire, you and I talking about how quickly the time has gone.

The author lives by sea in a small house most of the poems have sea in common. There are people experiencing sea of emotions. There are those who imagine a life by the sea. There are those who hang around somewhere between sky and the sea in the vacuum of nothingness.

They say that those who live by the ocean are waiting for something. Someone must have decided long ago to put

me by the sea. To live each moment by the light of the stars.

There are some advices for the girls who are not respected in the relationship.

Leave him, let him go. Don’t be the crazy ex-girlfriend or the shoulder to cry on.

You’re more than just an ego boost,

a story he can tell someone he’s trying to impress. Just walk away with your head held high and don’t give him another

second of your time. I know you love him so much that every step is killing you.

But this is the moment you’ll always

look back on as the day you put yourself first. Go and make something beautiful of your life and I promise you, one day

you’ll forget he was ever there.

There is some advice for the girl you were ten years back.

See that turn just up ahead? That’s the place where love will meet you, with arms so warm it will melt away the winter in an instant. And then, it will be summer for a very long time.

Each poem by Lang Leav fuses sea as nature and power with the emotions and so well that each poem resonates with you.

The collections seems very similar to ‘The Universe and Us’ but it is rather mature. Lang Leav goes one step ahead and tell you what wiring means to her.

This was my first ever read by Lang Leav. I had heard great things about her poetry and always wanted to read her work. I would say I wasn't disappointed at all. Her poems were really beautiful. This book is actually mix of prose and poetry. Her writing style will keep you engaged. This was really fast-paced, even the proses didn’t take much time to read. She switches flawlessly between the two mediums.

There were many poems that I really liked 🙂 The underlying theme of this poetry collection is that of love and loss. It talks about self-discovery and empowerment. But actually, Leav built this collection on a theme of the sea and water.

If you are a Lang Leav’s fan then you should definitely read this one. And if you want to read her for the first time, then this book is good to start with. Okay, I think I can’t resist to share one of the poems:

My Life
I will celebrate this life of mine, with or without you, The
moon does not need the sun to tell her she is already whole.

I adore Lang Leav. I have been a fan of her work for many years, and have read every one of her books (many of them more than once), and each time I finish one, I am left feeling a whirl wind of emotions. No matter how many times I read her poetry, I am always left in awe by her writing. Something about her writing is so serene and her words flow together beautifully.

So much of what she writes deeply resonates with me, and I often find myself thinking back on her words when I am going through a difficult time. Her poetry is such a comfort to me, and I am endlessly grateful for the existence of her poems. Even though all of her poetry in collections are similar in nature, I still find each one to be unique and beautiful in its own way.

I have actually had a copy of Sea of Strangers in my possession for a while now, but it wasn’t until recently that I finally picked it up and read it. I now realize that I was meant to wait to read it, as I am currently going through a difficult time, and once again, Lang Leav provided me the exact comfort that I am desperately in need of.

Sea of Strangers is an emotionally beautiful and empowering collection of prose and poetry about love, loss, healing, and self-discovery. This collection was incredibly moving, and I definitely had tears in my eyes when I read some of the poems.

I highly recommend this book (along with all of her other books if you have not yet read them!), especially to anybody that is going through a tough time and is in need of healing.

Lang Leav is truly a gift to the poetry world, and I am impatiently awaiting the release of her next book!

Another typical Lang Leav book, this time with an ocean/water theme. Continuous sadness and heartbreak. Could have been much shorter or had room for more original ideas/works if there weren't so many poems saying the same thing in different words.

This was a really great read! I've never read Leav's poetry before but now I might check out her other works as well. On top of being relaxing to read it was also really quick. I definitely recommend this to Leav's fans and other poetry lovers. 4 Stars

This is so beautiful. There something so serene about her words. It calms you down. There is this hidden hope and realisation.

Thank you for sending me this galley, however unfortunately I was unable to access this book on my e-reader.

This is the second book I read by Lang Leav.
I didn’t love the first one but this being the first poetry book of hers I read, I was hopeful.
And I was right to be.

I enjoyed it. It was both some prose and poetry.
Some of it were more powerful to me than others, but overall, I breathe through it and felt a lot reading it...

Lang Leav is not an unknown name in the poetry world, which left fans with a certain amount of excitement and anticipation leading up to her newest release. I, too, was eager to read Leav’s latest work since I’d been following her career from the days when she’d only been publishing on Tumblr. What Leav gives readers in her latest collection is what they’ve come to know from her: a story of love, love lost, and glimmers of hope that things will get better.

The word “sea” in the title Sea of Strangers is used symbolically and literally in Leav’s work. There is a sense that the narrator is working to cleanse herself of a love that she cannot let go of. As much as the narrator wants to let go of a love she cannot, she also searches for the recognition from other poets that what she felt was real and that she isn’t the only one who has ever felt like this. In the prose piece, “Witness,” Leav writes:

“It’s the mark of a great poet to write words that feel as though they stood witness to your most intimate memory of love.”
(p. 13).

“Witness” is one of the pieces that takes the reader out of the love story the poems create and into what could easily be the narrator’s journal. But where the pieces of prose act as a way for the narrator to understand herself better, the poems show us what she really wants: her former lover back. In the poem “Borrowed Love,” the narrator speaks directly to her former lover’s new partner:

“Kiss him if you want to,
But keep this in mind — 
You are a tourist here
I was his first love
And I will be his last.”
(p. 141).

The feeling I was left with once I finished Sea of Strangers was that I’d read two separate collections. On one hand, it was a eulogy for a love lost that the narrator was struggling to be able to let go of. On the other, a feminist call to action directed at young writers and poets to keep following their dreams. This is what makes Leav’s collection stand out: its authentic humanity. As we progress through stages of grief just as the narrator does over the loss of her love, our thoughts and feelings aren’t contained to one specific aspect of theme. Leav expertly brings myriad topics together and leaves the reader with their own “what ifs.”

One thing I know for sure now is that Leav's poetry/short prose collections are much stronger than her novels. PERIOD.

Although the themes were typical and reminded me of R.H. Sin's work which I don't really like, the writing is what forced me to give this a 3 stars. Another similarity between Leav's and Sin's work is that while reading I strongly felt that my rating could've been much higher if it wasn't for the repetitive concoction of poems I had to endure which shared similar themes such as love of self and heartbreak. I believe this could've been easily turned into a higher rated collection if only the editing team would've done their job and made sure that the almost entirely similar poems in the collection stayed unpublished, instead of adding them.

Leav's constant back and forth between poignant and extremely generic poetry and prose also irritated me; one moment I'd be thinking this was GOLD and the next I'd feel like I was reading some unpublished amateur poet's work on wattpad. Thus, naturally I feel very conflicted in terms of my rating and my reading experience as at times I felt like I was reading the work of two different people.

Some of the content was admittedly effective for me and generated butterflies in my stomach but the lack of variety in the themes and the back and forth between good and banal writing made this a 3 star read instead of a preferable 4 star one.

I'm not a fan of Instapoets, but Leav is a guilty pleasure.