Warning: this book depicts various representations of violence, especially against girls and women. Sex and drugs are frequent topics as well.

Starting off with an introduction about her obsession with true crime and all of the ways it has infiltrated her life with fear and paranoia, Olivia Gatwood's newest collection, Life of the Party, is a tribute to girls and their experiences, good, bad, and in between. In many poems, Gatwood is outlining the various ways that violence, particularly the violence of men, is ingrained in the lives of girls. In many poems, Gatwood is celebrating what it means to be a young girl, enthusiastic, soft, and powerful.

I'll be honest, this is not an easy collection to read. But it is worth it, and there are plenty of lighthearted or heartwarming depictions mixed in with the harsher depictions of violence. I laughed, I felt sick to my stomach, I felt seen, I felt scared, I felt strong. This is a complicated collection that can be difficult to digest, both in terms of the themes and in Gatwood's sometimes lengthy writing style.

This isn't the first time I've written about my love and admiration for Olivia Gatwood's poetry. [For proof, see my review here of her chapbook New American Best Friend.] Life of the Party has a few poems from that collection and others that were first published elsewhere as well as some new ones. While I really enjoyed seeing Gatwood perform at my university four or five years ago and loved so many of her poems in New American Best Friend, this new collection really hit in a more powerful way.

I'm not sure if it's simply because this collection felt more cohesive and like as a whole the poems were getting at the same stories and themes in various, complicated ways. Overall, this collection did feel much better organized.

As I stated in my last review, Gatwood's voice is unflinchingly honest and incredibly sharp. There are a lot of uncomfortable topics explored and presented in this collection, and while it's often easy to shy away from these things, I think it is important that Gatwood lays them out for us to face head-on. If you're a girl, this is a collection that will likely resonate with you in ways you don't expect, and in many ways that you do.

If you're a teen girl, this book is for you. For all of us who are or have been teen girls. If you think you're not or have never been a teen girl, watch the video below.

This was a great year for feminist and women centred poetry and this collection is no exception. I was especially impressed with the language, specifically how sharp it was. It may be cliche to say words can cut like knives, but it's true. This is not flowery, not boring. Gutsy and sharp.

I do5nt usually read poetry and didn't actually realize that is what this book was. I believe I chose this because the cover was just too beautiful to not request a copy. Despite that, I really ended up enjoying this book and found myself wanting to get more into poetry. I really like how this was presented.

This poetry collection is visceral, raw, and at times, incredibly funny. I feel like I'll need to read it a few times to really let it all sink in. I liked the differing formats and returning themes.

Very interesting concept, I don't think I've ever read poetry around the theme of true crime/violence against women. Some poems are stronger than other, but overall the collection was pretty good. I'll definitely check out what Olivia Gatwood does in the future.

At times dark and unsettling, this poetry collection doesn't pull punches. Sadly, this one just didn't work out for me.

Thanks Random House Publishing Group - Random House, Dial Press Trade Paperback, and Olivia Gatwood for the e-book ARC copy of this book.

The author's Note at the beginning of this book brought me chills, and made me excited to read this book. One poem, Murder of a Little Beauty, really brought on all the feels. One statement was never truer: "memory, too, lives in my body not my brain." And the writing throughout this collection was dark, beautiful, intense, and also quite difficult to both stomach and also understand.

I guess for a true crime guru, this book would have so much more meaning. I couldn't appreciate it much. My rating is due to what I've mentioned here, despite not catching so much of the references in the book. I'm very interested to see more work by this author.

Life of the Party
Poems

by Olivia Gatwood

Random House Publishing Group – Random House

Dial Press Trade Paperback

Poetry

Pub Date 20 Aug 2019

I am reviewing a copy of The Life of the Party through Random House/Dial Press Paperback and Netgalley:

Olivia Gatwood attracted an online fan base of millions for her extraordinary spoken-word performances, Olivia Gatwood now puts her own coming-of-age tale together with an investigation into our culture’s romanticization of violence against women. Life of the Party is a collection of poetry and prose that delves into the boundaries between what is real
and what is imagined. This book deals with how a girl grows into a woman in a world that is often violent, and deals with the question what is the difference between perpetrator and victim.

I found that Life of A Party is worthy of four out of five stars!

Happy Reading!

This collection was hard to read at times as it unapologetically discusses violence against women and the ways in which women live in constant fear while our society romanticizes the latest "beautiful missing/murdered girl" narrative. I definitely recommend this collection but be warned there are themes and content that may be triggering for some. Thanks to @netgalley for the early copy! FYI this collection is the top new poetry release on amazon!

Gatewood’s poetry collection is part memoir and partly inspired by True Crime. In each poem, she explores the meaning of becoming a woman and how men react to this sudden change from girlhood to womanhood. She also has an obsession with mistrusting men and believing that a man is going to kill her. Although, to be honest, what woman hasn’t thought about being killed by a man before? With the way True Crime depicts young girls and women always being victims of rape and murder, it’s no wonder that we grow up with this incessant paranoia. Her fear is very relatable if you’re a woman living pretty much anywhere in the world. Men abusing and killing women is a worldwide crisis and one that has only worsened over the years.

“Maybe I am tired
of hearing people talk about the murder
of girls like it is both beautiful
and out of the ordinary.”
-My Grandmother Asks Why I Don’t Trust Men

Gatewood explores the dark realms of her fears and tries to give voice to them through her poignant poetry. These poems are honest, raw, and sometimes quite dark. I recommend this book for all you that prefer your poetry to have a certain edge to is, but if you’re easily triggered then this collection won’t be for you.

*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Dial Press for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

A cursory online search for true crime podcasts reveals links with titles such as “52 of the Best True Crime Podcasts” and “Why True Crime Is Podcast Crack — for Women”. Search for yourself to see. There truly are more than fifty current podcast titles that at least one group of editors deemed worthy of people’s time and attention. And women seem to enjoy them. A lot.

More quick “research” turns up statistics like 75% of true crime podcast listeners are female. My Favorite Murder has around 80% female followers on Twitter, the most of any such podcast in this genre.

True crime podcasting and poetry might not appear at first blush to have much overlap, but Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party proves otherwise. With the ostensibly ekphrastic “Ode to My Favorite Murder”, for instance, Ms. Gatwood unwraps some of the knotty truth behind America’s moment of macabre obsession. She also lays bare a stark racial and sociopolitical through-line with her cross-sectional verse.

A brief bit of background: Ms. Gatwood hosts her own podcast entitled SAY MORE, though it is not devoted to true crime. She also advocates and educates on the subject of sexual assault prevention and recovery. As a writer, her work has been published in journals and a previous book (New American Best Friend), as well as seen or heard on many international television channels, including HBO, VH1, and BBC.

“I am not terrified because true crime told me to be,” she writes in the opening pages, “I am terrified because I have been here long enough to know I should be.”

While the #MeToo movement has shed light on some of this country’s darkest alleys and corners and bedrooms, women’s struggles have not come screeching to a halt. Feminism is still the future, many of us believe, but it is sadly not quite the present. Not yet.

“This is a book of poems about true crime,” she says. “It is also a book of poems about the many small violences a person can withstand.” These early statements portend with an almost startling accuracy the poems to come.

Life of the Party does not only speak in the language of true crime (or equally violent fictions), but it is at its best when it does so. Armed with this lexicon, Ms. Gatwood deftly brings to light the inequity inherent in American politics and culture. In so doing, she exposes what many refuse to see even in broad daylight.

dab your eye, we know
you like it gory
only the blondes get a
cover story

girls go missing right
around the corner
but she needs a tiara for
us to mourn her

naturally attractive,
exceptionally bright
how many ways can we
say the word white?

In this poem (“Murder of a Little Beauty”, reflecting on the JonBenét Ramsey murder), the meter and rhyme echo both the cadence and emphasis of the piece as well as the author’s own spoken word performances.

Ms. Gatwood writes with clarity, insight, and an incisive wit (see “Ode to My Bitch Face”). Her language pricks the skin immediately. One feels her presence throughout the text, as though she sits there on the couch, reading over the shoulder, pronouncing each word in turn. Such is the strength and energy of her voice.

Apart from a very tiny number of wooden or overworked phrases (“smiles painted onto their faces”), the book offers precious little to complain about. On the contrary, each piece builds on the preceding pages, alternating from verse to prose and back again, volleying forward unpleasant truths like the bouncing dot over lyrics during a rather dark singalong.

Ms. Gatwood has written a millennial tour de force. Her work is reminiscent of Lavina Blossom’s “After the Harlequinn”, a poem written in the same mode, though a full three decades prior. At the same time, some of the poems could almost have been penned by Lena Dunham’s character from HBO’s Girls. Such is the timeless and yet thoroughly modern nature of the work.

One prays to the literature gods to come across a great new poem. When they answer with an entire collection of poetry, you have a moral obligation to spread the news. Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party may very well be the book of poetry that we needed to slap us out of our stupor.

This is my favorite poetry collection I've read this year. Olivia Gatwood takes true crime as her starting point and uses it to explore men's violence to women and for whatever reason this really works as a pathway to exploring viscerally real ideas about feminism. When I read her author's note about why she decided to write poems about true crime, I was intrigued but skeptical, but by the end of the first section I was blown away. I'm sure this is the kind of poetry that some reviewers may describe as "hauntingly beautiful," but I don't think that's the right phrase here - it's visceral, it's violent, and it's disturbing, and the message she conveys is gut-punching in both obvious and surprising ways.

I was expecting more from this book then what there was. I did relate to some of the lines in the poems in this collection. I didn't feel connected to it like i do with other poetry which is important to me. I feel that the poetry that I connect with is the ones that I enjoy more and stay with me. The poems that I don't connect with I usually don't remember that much. I do like this style of poems just these weren't for me, I guess.

Oliva Gatwood continues to kick me in the gut every time I read her work. This particular collection was phenomenal. I was snapping, yelling "SAY IT," and was so engrossed in her imagery and words. Life of the Party accurately and painfully expressed what it is like to be a woman and how we reclaim ourselves back. This collection had some poems centered on true crime cases and those were fascinating as well. If you are a fan of her spoken word poems, a few of her spoken pieces are included in this, and they vibed well with the rest of the material in this book. I highly recommend this collection and this is definitely a work that will be lingering in your head long after you have read it.

Note: I received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

These collections of poems are some poems that i never read before. I’m not usually a poetry girl but I really loved this book. In the authors note the author explained how the various poems was about true crime and women getting murdered and you can feel that in every poem. You can feel the fear , being scared when men try and cat call to you , when they harass you, make you do things that you don’t want to do. You fee scared , lost, all the emotions and thats what I loved about these poems. I read this book so fast and I am going to look into more of Olivia Gatwood’s work.

This collection of poetry is one of my favorites for the year. The author really touched on more relevant topics, such as women's safety, which I felt was super important.

My review will eventually be published on my website at racheljorquera.com. A direct link can be provided once it is no longer “under construction.” It will be published closer to the date of book publication, so around August 15th. For now, the review is being posted to Instagram (@rachandherbooks) and Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2912568290)

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Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood is a visceral collection that explores societies overall fascination with true crime, specifically violence against women. In her introduction to the collection, Gatwood notes that she wants to honor the women, not sensationalize them. She holds true to that statement. She opens her collection with “GIRL” after Ada Limón:

i’m a good girl, bad girl, dream girl, sad girl

and continues to say:

mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls

and ends on:

we are girls
silent and dead and still
the life of the party.

Gatwood opens the collection with the strength of womanhood and ends on a powerful note that after death, after the romanticized ideal of who and what we are, we remain the life of the party. Morbid, haunting, and true.
This collection is bold, to say the least. This collection is noted to be part memoir, and on a level, people can connect to this collection in a deeper way than just true crime retellings. Society has been all too absorbed with the true crime narrative that is pumped across all media platforms. True crime can quickly skim the line of glorifying the people that commit these violent crimes. Gatwood does tread lightly at times, while other poems are very raw and necessary.

Often times, crimes against women are skimmed over. They are romanticized, and their faces are plastered everywhere. Women are talked about tenderly, softly, and gently. Yet the horrific things that are committed, are often muted and dulled. Gatwood doesn’t let that happen in this collection. Her poems are blunt as they explore the female body, sex for the first time, rape, social situations, murder, etc. She questions society and what society gives us. How are women supposed to feel safe in a world that perpetrates fear for women? How are girls supposed to grow up in that kind of world? Olivia explores that in these poems. Her words drip across the page. They punch. They scream. They breathe.

Gatwood traces the phenomenon of the serial killer using famous killers and victims (Manson, Bundy, Wuornos, Black Dahlia, etc.) while coupling them with contemporary and personal stories. I thought the way Gatwood wove the two was exceptional. The overarching theme of this is women and the violence and fear that is upon them at all times. The door is never locked too tight. The window is never shut too tight. There is never anywhere safe.

Gatwood has a couple of series of poems in this collection like the excerpts about the babysitter, and another phenomenal section on Aileen Wuornos. The Aileen poems were powerful. Aileen, being a friend of the speaker, almost helps her through coping and trauma. I thought that was so interesting considering Wuornos is considered one of the first female serial killers. These ended up being by favorite.

Gatwood explores in her writing and poetry. She couples poetry and prose to document the reality of it all. She uses form in fresh ways to push her narrative further. She removes capitalization and punctuation to not let the reader have breaks in-between lines, so they too feel the fear creep up on them.

This is a hunting collection that will stay with me for a while. Highly recommend this visceral bombshell of a book.
Thank you, NetGalley, for advanced reader access to this collection of poems in exchange for an honest review.

What a phenomenal book of poetry. Fixating on our obsessions with true crime, victims, and the possession of women’s bodies, Gatwood is just absolutely effing phenomenal.

I read this collection over the span of about a week because there was so much to it. It's not exactly a short collection - my edition was about 70 pages, but each of the poems is pretty long - so that was one of the reasons. The main reason, though, is that the subject matter is just so serious and dark.

The gist of the collection is explained in the introduction. It's not something you should skip; the introduction sets the stage for the rest of the book and Olivia Gatwood is just as good at writing essays as she is poetry. This collection is about the true crime community. Those are basically stories about real-life crimes, mainly about women who get murdered. It's all about how the killer gets caught and examining what went on in the killer's mind and things of that nature. Olivia, though, gets obsessed with it in the same way a lot of women do. She can so easily see herself in the face of those poor women who are victims.

This really spoke to me because I recently got sucked in to true crime videos on YouTube. I couldn't figure out why I was so intrigued by them. It's absolutely horrifying and sad and angering to watch innocent women taken from life and their family left to mourn. You can't really have justice, even if the killer gets locked up forever, because you can't bring back that person. I didn't know "Life of the Party" was going to be about this topic. I'm not sure what I thought, going in, but it wasn't this. But wow, did it have an impact. I highlighted so many quotes and bookmarked lots and lots of poems.

This is the book for women who look over their shoulders at night, for women who double-check that the doors are locked, for women who enter every room with a flutter of their heart because there could be a serial killer behind the door. Because in the end, we're all afraid of the same thing. And this collection does a beautiful job exploring that.

TW: basically everything. Sexual assault, murder, violence...you know what you're getting into if you know about the true crime genre. Proceed with caution.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

What a book of poetry this is! Olivia Gatwood's writing brings you back to all those moments in your life, as a child, as an adolescent, as a young adult. You see yourself again in those moments. Moments of innocence and youth and carefree and uninhibited. And then. And then you see them through a filter of sexism and betrayal and violence and abuse and trauma, both overt and covert. Written so accessibly, so vividly, so emotionally. A book not to be missed.

Thank you to netgalley and Random House, I received an advanced reader's copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.