I keep requesting the poetry books to get more ideas on how to expand my library's poetry collection (the public library where I work not necessarily my personal one). I am almost never disappointed even though I personally find poetry the hardest format to read and then talk about.

These poems were beautifully done. The experimental approach of mixing traditional poetic technique and practices with the modern creates something new and unique. The themes can be dark, but poetry often pulls on darker emotions and experiences to create something beautiful and meaningful in the aftermath.

Sorry Netgalley, but his has to be my first bad review of the lot. I usually love reading poetry, and I don't mind reading modern one either. I lvoe Amanda Lovelace, Rupi Kaur... but this wasn't it. English is not my first language, but I'm more than quite good at it. While reading this I thought more than once that I did not know the language.
The poetry collection sounded with in theory, the poems even have great titles, but the words seemed randomly selected to be on the page most of the time. I can't recommend this reading to anyone. Sorry.

I thought I would love this collection, and was so excited to get to read the arc. However, this collection fell flat for me and touched on a lot of topics that felt stale to me. It might just be that I read so many poetry titles, that i'm getting tired of reading poems about the same emotions and themes. I loved the concept but I found the execution lacking.

Thank you to Katherine Factor, University of Nevada Press, and Netgalley for this free ARC copy of <I>A Sybil Society: Poems</I>. The cover of this book and the title entranced me; everything from the dark mystique to the implications of the terminology, past, and present.

Poetry still and forever seems to be a hard field for anyone to break into or get much traction within to shine, but with a heavy heart, I have to say this read really was not my type of poetry. I really expected to love this book so much, especially once it came out the game with so many familiar mythological references, erudite use of vocabulary, & delightfully on-point poem titles. But the poetry felt like it was all over the place, that the pieces were too similar, without there being a purpose (or overarching motif they were all touching), and it's left me wanting.

This collection contains some of the best titles I´ve ever read, but the poems do not live up to their titles. The poet has a strong musical ear, but the lyrical beauty of one line is undermined by the bad punning in another, Each poem in the book sounds like every other poem, and there is little to no payoff for the discerning reader.

I don't like giving books negative review--especially not poetry--but this just really was not for me. It felt like the poems were just random collections of words thrown together without any rhyme or reason. The meanings were hard to follow and even harder to care about. I was just left unimpressed and wanting more.

**Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

A Sibil Society by Katherine Factor is the poets first published collection of poetry. Factor is an editor and educator that has read poems at the Nevada Test Site. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa and has held writer-in-residence positions at Idyllwild Arts Academy and Interlochen Arts Academy.

First off this is not an easy collection of poetry. It is not "Instagram poetry." That being said, the reader should also know that is not this is not traditional lyrical poetry either, although it does contain some lyrical aspects in places. The alliteration is amazing. It connects words and ideas, that many times would not seem to mesh, seamlessly. I also enjoyed the touch with classical Greek mythology intermixed in with modern texting shorthand: something very traditional with something very new -- Delphi Selfie.

The writing style brought to mind some of the AI generated text to image pictures that I have seen. At first glance, everything seems normal and expected, but on closer examination nothing is as it seems or even describable. The poetry has the same effect at times. As in the poem "Pleasure Centaur" The reader is forced to pay attention to the smallest details or miss the bigger meaning.

Factor is also not afraid to use words that, I expect, many others do not know. I found myself reading the dictionary almost as much as I read the poems. Factor also likes to use words that almost mimic what we expect to see. Even the title works this pattern. One would expect "Civil Society" rather than "Sybil Society." We expect to see "we travel the countryside," not the author's "we travail the countryside." Other times phrases take on deeper meanings. "Lady with the Lamp" uses fire throughout, but one line caught my attention -- "Fire of the destroyer, welding this war." Fire is destroying but it holds together war by joining the opposing sides in conflict.

While much of the poetry would be considered experimental, it is approachable for those with patience to get lost inside the lines. It is not literal poetry but poetry that encourages thinking and embracing the abstract. A well done and complex first work from the author.

Dark, metaphorically rich, and feminist.

The poems have an off-beat style with staccato breaks and interesting stanza placement, causing some to read as lyrical and on tempo, and others to come off as confused and jittery. This was not an easy collection to follow, but it still is enjoyable and deeply enchanting when I was able to finally immerse myself.

My favorite poems are: "Make Love Not Wall", "Mycenae, Founded by Fungi", and "WTF @the Library of Alexandria."

This was an excellent piece of work. However, the formatting of the poems and how they were laid out was a bit of a struggle for me to understand throughout the book and made it harder for me to read through it.
One of the things that I really enjoyed in this book was the way that the ancient and the modern were intertwined together in the poems. Modern terminology was used to connect with and describe objects and people that we find most often in ancient history.
A beautiful and unique work of art.

While I appreciated all of the themes that this collection presented, ultimately this was not quite for me. There were a few poems that I found very powerful, and a few verses that really captivated me. However, some of the poems felt very disjointed, and there were a few verses or word choices that felt odd and took me out of the poems.

Some of my favourite poems in the collection are:

- An Ariadne
- Antediluvian Floozy
- Queen of the Night
- The Feisty Disc Discovery
- We All Need a Death Doula
- Whistle Blow Her

This book is dark and beautiful. The titles of the poems themselves are poetry. The poetry is neither old fashioned nor entirely modern, combining elements of more traditional poetry with some modern abbreviations and elements to create poems that perfectly capture the topics of this book have been issues for more than one era.

Poetry is very subjective and unfortunately this collection was not for me. There were some amazing lines such as “we are chromosomes extracted from what is dormant” that really hit a chord in me. However not enough for me to actually immerse myself into the collection.