A very well put together collection of poems which I could not connect with on a personal level.But the themes are very well and thoroughly and impeccably written.

The Vital Function of Constant Narrative, by Marlys West is marketed as both memoir and poetry. I love poetry and I love memoirs, and a crossover of the two genres is something I haven’t seen before.

Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this was executed particularly well. I was bored a quarter of the way through. I know it’s a bit harsh to say that the story of someone’s life is boring, but it didn’t feel like a memoir.

And it barely felt like poetry. This is coming from a person who reads and enjoys a lot of bad poetry. Here’s the thing. Poetry is emotion. I don’t care about the technical aspects of poetry if it doesn’t make me feel things.

This collection isn’t bad, but it is largely forgettable. It’s the type of book an academic library adds to the collection because the author is faculty.

I usually try to share some passages that touched me, but nothing really stood out. Every page is like the title of this book, unnecessarily verbose without leading to a point. It’s the kind of poetry that makes me feel like I’m missing something. Or like maybe I’m not smart enough to get it. That puts me off reading more of this author’s work.

⭐️⭐️ for me. I’m sure there’s an audience for this, but it’s not me. Big thanks to NetGalley & V Press LC, Independent Book Publishers for the ARC.

I was offered this book as an ARC via NetGalley. I am not especially up to scratch when it comes to reading poetry and suspect that I missed a lot of the subtly here. In fact West sum the feeling up with the lines 'When I read something that makes no sense, I know the writer is onto something'. Although I feel like I missed the point entirely of some of the poetry, West does write some beautiful lines and produces incredibly vivid imagery such as 'How do you call birds for dinner? ... Shiver seeds in the palm like sand?' The phrase 'Shiver seeds' is both a novel and yet somehow fitting description of shaking seeds into your hand to feed them. There are many poems that blend the home and hospital imagery into a senseless blur - I mean that to be a compliment as that disorientating sensation is very real when you live between the two. The works here are incredibly dense and I feel as though I would need to read each a number of times to allow the meaning to be sifted to the surface. A very intriguing book overall which possibly deserves a higher rating but as I couldn't tell you what some of the poems were about I would feel like a bit of a fraud pretending otherwise!

I found most of the pieces incoherent. I like a bit of dissonance and disruption to make a point, but to me this felt like every second phrase was going out of its way to be confusing or mysterious, but landed at incomprehensible. Not for me.

This was a well puts together collection but I didn't really connect with the content on a personal level.

Review based on an advanced copy made available through NetGalley & V Press LC, Independent Book Publishers

West does what she does very well. There is a poetic understanding of the usage of symbolism and enjambment that West uses masterfully. She plays a lot with disjointing meaning & creating poems that are borderline absurd & purposefully incomprehensible, which ins interesting, I suppose, academically. It just wasn't for me. It is heavy on themes of motherhood and wifehood which I can rarely relate to (Amanda Auchter's The Glass Crib was one of the exceptions to this). The references to mental illness were obscure. There were turns of phrases that I like in and of themselves, but were incoherent to me in context. I really struggled with finding a handhold, which might have been the point/on purpose? Question mark? It clearly is, at times, purposefully obfuscating meaning. It was difficult for me, in particular, to read. I felt like I was in a tenebrous swampy voidal space that someone was insisting was full of brightly colored images.

If you are into lyrical poems where meaning is elusive & illusionary this collection might very well be for you, even if it wasn't for me.

It's very hard for me to read poetry because I don't know if I'm getting it right, or am just dumb, but there were some pieces that really struck me and I keep thinking about them.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this.

This feels like a collection that a reader will either love or not. While I tried really hard to get into this one myself, the more I read it, the less I wanted to finish it.

I wish the author good luck, but this collection is not for me. It’s just a matter of taste!

Each poem in this fine collection is a small jewel of a life story. When strung together, the resulting collection is part meditation on our place in the universe, part memoir, and part healing.

The writing is beautiful, such as this first stanza of the poem Bang:
Our universe began with the end of another. Now it’s
after dinner,
I’m standing at the kitchen window behind short,
white curtains,
hand in a hot sink full of platters, hand hovering over
cosmic dust,

And these last couple of lines from Everything Twice:
American English takes me ages to travel to the end of
a sentence

If you enjoy life stories, thoughts on life, our place in the world, and/or being immersed in words, I recommend this collection.

# **The Vital Function of Constant Narrative**

## **by Marlys West**

****Pub Date 30 Apr 2022 |****

****[V Press LC,](https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/publisher/64500) Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Members' Titles**

****[Biographies & Memoirs](https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/category/2) |  [Nonfiction (Adult)](https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/category/34) |  [Poetry](https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/category/33)**

I am reviewing a copy of The Vital Function of Constant narrative through

V Press, L.C, Independent Book Publishers and Netgalley:

The Vital Function of Constant Narrative is part memoir and mystery, as well as a collection of poetry. Each poem is a short meditation on what it means to make up a sense of self.

Marly’s West reminds us in this book that our roles, our world, and our personal histories create much of who we are and what we think of as our story. The poems in this book

expose reality in all of its multicolored arrays, weaving together adulthood and childhood, hospital and home, birds and flowers, blood and bones. The book is at once light and dense, profound and playful.

I give the Vital Function of Constant Narrative five out of five stars1

Happy Reading!