This was a great poetry book. I always absolutely enjoy her work and I can't wait to read more in the near future. I highly recommend it.

i really enjoyed reading Ms. Bellamacina's poetry, they flowed well and were written well. I look forward to more from the author.

This book wasn't for me at all. I couldn't get into the writing at all. I didn't feel any connection to any of the poems. Nothing bad about it, it just wasn't for me.

Title; Tomorrow's Women
Author: Greta Bellamacina
Rating: Two and a half Stars

A dazzling poetic meditation on motherhood, female identity, ennui, and love by Greta Bellamacina, London-based poet, actress, filmmaker, and model.

Personally I picked it up a couple of times trying to see the magic others saw in this one. But honestly, I just failed to see it.
Halfway through after a dozen attempts to understand her thoughts, I gave up. There were so many things that didn't resonate with me at all.
Maybe others might enjoy it. Many have. But this one just wasn't for me, I guess. It just seemed like an average book of mediocre writing skills when I did finish it successfully.

Tomorrow's Woman isn't my kinda book.

Thanks to #NetGalley for the review copy of #TomorrowsWoman

This collection of poetry felt like it was trying too hard to come off as profound, deep, and complex. In most of the poems, the language usage seemed arbitrarily "unique" or "different" solely to give readers the impression that this is a special and unique text - almost like the author was aiming at surrealism but didn't quite hit the mark. The foreword also conveyed the impression that this was the goal of the author.

A gorgeous book of poetry.Real open magical.A book of poems by this wonderful poet will draw you in to this lyrical beautiful writing,#netgalley #Andrew McNeil .

"You are reminded again of the sky
a flower of dust, dancing like a snow globe
emptying out its possessions for you
Before there was anything,
everything was hailing,
all our hearts were comets up in the sky
and everything was hailing."

Thank you Andrew Mcmeel's for reaching out to me about reviewing this poetry collection!

I am disappointed. Whenever I have a bad review to write, I always wait until I don't feel strongly about it but 4 days later and I am still strongly disappointed.

For me, a poem is something that you let your heart and soul to feel with. Sometimes, you come across some thought-provoking poems that question your intellect and resonates deeply in your heart and soul. Poetry is something that entwines with your heart and dances with your soul. But this collection...

Greta has brought out some beautiful, new metaphors and imagery in such a good way but by focussing on new metaphors, she has lost the essence of the poems as a whole. They all make sense in bits and pieces but never as a whole. There are some poems which demands too much of your intellect to figure out what she is trying to say that there are very, very few moments where you let your heart and soul to experience the poems in this collection. There is a foreword by her husband, Robert Montgomery (with which I have complaints about, as well) and it raises your expectation to a whole new level only for the poems to disappoint you. Maybe if there was no such foreword, I wouldn't have read this collection with high expectations and maybe, I would have been a bit less harsh about how I feel. The more pages I read, the more I became disappointed and my brain just shut down. It refused to do all the work in understanding these poems.

There are a few aspects that I liked as well: the length and the style of poems. I felt that the short poems made more sense and I felt that they were beautifully put out but I only found one of the long poems, 'When The Morning Comes', to be wonderfully written! I also loved "Tomorrow's Woman' but in 2 pieces, separately. I loved the new metaphors and I pray that in her next collection, she will encompass them in a way they need to be.

I believe in Greta's potential. I have a feeling that she will be one of the revolutionary poetess' of our time but she can only be one if she puts a bit work in crafting a poem as the lines feel out of the place. I might keep an eye out for her future works.
Just because I didn't enjoy this collection doesn't mean that you will not enjoy it as well. It is alright to give this a try.

Rating: 1.5/5

Tomorrow’s Woman by Greta Bellamacina

5 stars

Woah. This is the poetry collection I’ve been searching for by modern poets. Modern poetry is steeped in a lot of short and clipped poetry. Some of it can pack a punch, but most of it just leaves me hanging and unsatisfied. Tomorrow’s Woman showcases that long-form poetry is not forgotten and is still effective. It was STUNNING. Greta Bellamacina is a truly captivating poet and one of the best of our age. This collection captivated me and it covers everything from love, grief, and pregnancy. I loved that this collection celebrates pregnancy and what that can mean for a woman. I feel like there aren’t many poems written about the topic and it was beautiful to read in this medium. I was also a huge fan of her conservation poetry “Whale Nation in a Plastic Bag” was one of the best poems in this collection.


“Tomorrow’s woman has seen war in heaven
she is the blue of light before time draws”

Whimsical Writing Scale: 5

Favorite Poems:
*Tomorrow’s Woman
*Church
*Living Room Mirror
*Whole World On Your Hips
*Clear Water
*Revolution
*In the Morning, Penelope
*Life
*Pale Gold
*Stockholm Syndrome
*New Glass
*When You Wake
*Collapse of the World
*Dartmoor Wedding Song
*Death
*The Dreamers
*Silent Languages
*Phosphorescent
*Above Water
*The Perseid Meteor Shower
*Afterlight
*Missing Europe
*Unoccupied
*The Jungle
*May Trees
*Whale Nation in a Plastic Bag
*East Window
*Dawn Breaking

I would recommend this poetry collection 100%. Out of all of the poetry collections I’ve read this is the only one that I have enjoyed all of it and had no issues. I loved it. If you only read one poem in 2020, pick up Tomorrow’s Woman.


Plotastic Scale: 5
Cover Thoughts: I love the cover and the blurred image. I saw it and was immediately drawn in.

Thank you, Netgalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

Greta Bellamacina's "Tomorrow's Woman" hasn't catch all my attention.

The collection is divided into four sections: Tomorrow’s Woman, Pregnancy, Love, and Loss, Grief, and Thunder.
Sometimes I had to stop reading or skip to something else to do. Maybe it was me that couldn't understand entirely the beauty of these poems.
I have appreciated the Tomorrow's Woman' section.
My approach to poetry is at the beginning and maybe, with another reading of this poetry collection.

Greta Bellamacina writes with exquisite imagery flowing throughout her poems in "Tomorrow's Woman." She frequently explores light, stars, and earth in this collection. It is beautiful and inspiring, aching and open. Highly recommended for all poetry collections.

Tomorrow's Woman by Greta Bellamacina is a collection of intriguing poetry. The poems within this collection was written in a style that I hadn't before encountered. The poems, while hard to decipher the personal meaning and symbolism, were interesting and made me pause to think about.
Of the poems, this section of a poem called The Jungle really spoke to me.

If we were to meet out of this time
seven dozing swans
rushing so quickly that we mistake them for paper.

And we know all the things, we know now
that the sun always pulls the light back

and we are always solared by our dreams,
sabotaging objects
killing quickly, and making us bored

and the gazing electrical shelters
have a home for us.

Despite not understanding a lot of what the poems meant, I enjoyed this collection immensely.

I somehow managed to go almost a year without reading poetry, even though I have about seven collections on my TBR... so I was happy to break the streak with Tomorrow's Woman. According to the publisher notes, this is Bellamacina's first United States publication, with her distinct French and British influences.

The collection is broken into four sections: Tomorrow's Woman, Pregnancy, Love, and Loss, Grief, and Thunder. There is an introduction by Robert Montgomery who instantly disects the uniqueness within Bellamacina's poems, and gives insight to the reader about what you will experience as you read on. One of the things he notes is,

"I have believed passionately that poetry in English, to be new, needs to forget the English language as much as possible...Twenty years ago, I began to look for a poet who could do that- when I found Greta, I finally found that poet."

This unique style of Bellamacina's, however, is quite possibly something that the average dabbler in poetry (like myself) wouldn't be able to "get". I say this because, as I read through the collection, I kept thinking, I have no idea what she's talking about. However, for the sake of this review, I'm going to give it my best interpretive shot.

Tomorrow's Woman is the section about women's oppression, and the will we have to move beyond it, to push through that figurative glass ceiling we always mention. Pregnancy is a little more obvious, discussing the miracle that is a woman's body, discussing birth, rebirth, miscarriages, and other aspects of womanhood. Love recounts the obvious, of emotions and feelings surrounding love, being loved, and of heartbreak.
Loss, Grief, and Thunder is about life and death, and the whirlwind of personal relationships.

This collection covers topics that should be relatable to most women, but because of Bellamacina's style, it's really hard to comprehend what I'm supposed to be relating to. It feels as if the poetry has gotten lost in translation, or honestly as if she strung together some lofty, creative words to form a stanza that should create some sort of imagery, but it doesn't- or not consistently enough for me. There are some lines that I did think were beautiful, or that caught my imagination, but the poems in their entirety did not leave a lasting overall impression.

In the end, this was a bit of a disappointment for my return to reading poetry. Although there were some lovely high points, they weren't the majority of my reading experience. 

*This review will be posted on 2/4/2020 on my blog, www.thelexingtonbookie.com.*

This striking cover caught my eye and the thoughtful poems it held did not disappoint. The poems vary in length from a few lines to two pages, giving it a nice rhythm without getting monotonous. A good number of these poems fall into the form of writing that is not necessarily readily understandable, but is truly beautiful and allows for reader interpretation. Those who love to interpret passages on their own will enjoy these poems. Readers who prefer to have things simply stated may be less comfortable.

Strong poetry forms the basis of the creative freedom in this book. While it may not be for everyone, I deeply appreciate what this author has captured.

I’d never heard of Bellamacina before and decided to read this after the publisher sent out a promotional email about the collection. I was blown away by how much I enjoyed the poems on offer. Bellamacina’s poems are beautiful and lyrical. The poems are different lengths but never more than a couple of pages so the collection was easy to dip in and out of. I particularly enjoyed Clear Water, Stockholm Syndrome, The Jungle and Above Water. The poems explore the idea of being a woman in modern society through Bellamacina’s own experiences. I thought this was terrific.

I didn't like the writing, the poetry. Maybe it might be brilliant and I might have not been able to grasp that emotion, I can't tell. Given the description, I had high expectations going inti this book. But not only I cpuldn't relate the what she wrote, I couldn't make sense out of it. It just felt like odd words put together with no rhyming pattern/style at all. Everything was so loosely put together and didn't seem organized at all.

This is an unusual collection of poetry.
The reader’s sense of embracing it is slightly lost in Robert Montgomery’s impassioned introduction. Someone who struggles to get to grips with understanding poems got some of what he was saying but left me grasping for meaning and a sense of reason. He implies that true poetry written in English should read like a translated piece from a magical language. Shorthand for gobbledygook is to be expected as it is art the mark of genius.
Well poetry often seems like a foreign tongue to me and without clarity there is little comprehension.
The more you read the better it seems and I remove myself from literary criticism and academic views and aim for what sounds good or verses I like.
With you tube I have found that often you can hear poets like Greta Bellamacina reading their work. This helps with rhythm and context and gives a more manageable bite to digest.
For me Stockholm Syndrome was clearer when I learned it was about her pregnancy and The Jungle was about the refugee camp in France but neither still satisfy me fully:
I like Seven Sisters as a whole poem, and Waiting Room Hands appealed to me and showed me that it was worth trying to understand Greta the poet more.

Some of her couplets resonate with me:
“the oceans are filled with reason
they reflect us in their wake.”
ABOVE WATER
‘Faraway I put the memory of you above water.
and send it out as a paper boat.’
“I don’t know how many times we’ve moved house
to find space for dreaming.”

I liked that the poems are grounded in London and that they reflect the person of the poet. I wish I understood all the classical references, the use of bird, flowers and colours - blue coms up a lot. 5 poems mention library or libraries so I wonder what this signifies other than I have fines to pay.

I enjoyed these poems; re-read and they’ll grow on me more but this isn’t my natural comfort zone. We should read more poetry here is another idea to begin that process.

This collection starts with an introduction from Robert Montgomery where he says that for him, new poetry in English, should be free of the English language itself. He finds Greta's work to be this way. I would agree with him that the words that she uses and the imaginary she tries to project in the reader's mind is something out of the ordinary. However, the disadvantage of breaking away from normal writing is that it distances the people who love reading in it. A collection about motherhood, female identity, parenthood, I was fascinated by the concept but the poems themselves appeared disjoint to me.

The book is divided into four sections with each section housing its own collection of poems. I could not make sense of many of the poems, never mind relate them to the bigger theme. I am not even sure if the way I interpreted the poems I could understand were even supposed to be that way! There is one that I think talks about the possibility of dying at childbirth but as complicated as it is, I have no way of saying if that is what I wanted to take away from it or was the poem really about that? Come to think of it, something that leaves so much room for interpretation is unique in itself. I am usually able to visualize what is going on, and feel the sentiments being conveyed in poems, but this collection only brought that about ever so often.

Overall, this was a unique experience. I am thankful to the publisher and author for making an ARC available via NetGalley.

Thanks to the publisher for directly reaching out to read this one. I thought this was much longer than a typical book of poetry, but overall still good. Bellamacina writes in a style I have not come across yet, but I loved it and I really enjoyed the length of her poems (being not too long). One of my favorites was 'Clear Water'.

Not really my style of poetry, I am not really the target audience I don’t think, or at least if it’s aimed at tomorrow’s women how about we focus a little less on pregnancy, maternity etc, yes I get women have babies but it’s not our sole purpose. I just didn’t find any kind of connection with the poems, nothing resonated with me and this is rare, some just didn’t make sense. Not for me sorry.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion