Arc Review:
Overall Rating: 4 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cover Rating: 4 Stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Stars Around My Scars: The Annotated Poetry of Taylor Swift. I’ve never read a book where they analyze the lyrics in a song so this was a totally new experience for me but still an enjoyable one. The annotations were easy to follow along with, and the breakdown of everything was good, you got to see how the author analyzed the lyrics from metaphors, to symbolism, and just the evolution of Taylor herself. I enjoyed reading this and getting to experience a different side of Taylor’s songs and lyrics.

Thank you NetGalley

This book is an accessible and thorough look at Taylor Swift’s songs, though it doesn’t cover every track. It’s definitely geared toward big Swiftie fans, offering deep dives into lyrics and themes. While I appreciated the analysis, some annotations felt more like opinions than fact. I would have loved more references to Taylor’s own interviews where she confirms song meanings. Overall, it’s a solid read, but I found myself wanting a little more.

Very engaging and interesting read. Very well developed and ambitious. Will be recommending to library collection and patrons.

I approached Stars Around My Scars with an open mind, first because I appreciate and enjoy Swift's songwriting and second because I found this project to be truly fascinating. In the end, I have to say that this left me slightly disappointed, it had the potential to be so much more than it ended up being.

Stars Around My Scars: The Annotated Poetry of Taylor Swift by Dr. Elly McCausland

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5

Whew! I feel like I’ve earned my English degree after reading this one! 😳 I sure did enjoy it, though.

Dr. McCausland takes us on a journey through 46 of the most poetic songs in Taylor Swift’s discography, going line by line, breaking them down, dissecting them, and pulling out the meat within.

As a Swiftie myself, I am no stranger to the poetic nature of Taylor’s writing. I have always been a fan of her storytelling and lyricism, relating to her more than any other artist in the field. From my first listen of her debut album in second grade all the way to her most recent release, The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), I have recognized the genius of the writer that is Taylor Swift, and thus why I enjoyed this annotation so much.

Dr. McCausland does a brilliant job breaking Taylor’s writing down into even more detail than I as a devoted fan have ever noticed. She links songs together across multiple albums, draws connections to literature I had never considered, and points out hidden Easter eggs in songs I’ve heard a million times. I truly enjoyed the opportunity to consider Swift’s writing in a new and exciting way.

This annotation is a bit wordy and does have some complex terms in it, however, McCausland has helpfully provided a glossary that explains some of the more challenging terminology in the back of the book.

As with any poetry anthology, I prefer to take my time reading. I have found that rushing through poetry makes it difficult to fully grasp the meaning layered throughout. You might pick up something new with each read through. That’s precisely why I took my time with this one. I wanted to be able to sit with the words and really marinate in their depth. I personally don’t see this book as a collection that could be read in one sitting, at least without only scratching the surface of the content and missing the heart of the matter. It would be doing the book a true disservice.

While I primarily read fiction, namely romance and fantasy, I do love to pick up a book of poetry every now and then to stay on my toes. I feel like there is such a plethora of knowledge to be gleaned from poetry, and I have noticed that I always come away with a stronger grasp on my feelings and emotions than when I went in.

I truly enjoyed this annotation and think Dr. McCausland did a brilliant job dissecting Taylor’s catalog.

Thank you to NetGalley, Dr. Elly McCausland, and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions shared are my own!

This review will be posted on Goodreads, Amazon, and Instagram in the coming days, and this review will be updated with the subsequent links.

This was a beautifully and well written fan focused in depth analysis of the deeper meaning, craftsmanship, and literary connections of 46 of Taylor Swifts' most celebrated and favorite songs from during her 11 album career. As a huge Swifty, I highly enjoyed and recommend reading.

This was beautiful. If you’re a swiftie, or even if you’re not, you should know that Taylor Swift is extremely poetic with her writing. Her lyrics hold more than one might think upon first listen and this book captures that perfectly.

It breaks down the lyrics, their meaning, potential alternative meaning, connections to other songs, etc. i think every Taylor Swift fan or non-Taylor Swift fan will enjoy this book as it really helps to connect the reader to Swift’s lyrics on a deeper level through understanding of their meaning.

A delightful delve into Taylor's discography. A must read for any fan of analyzing literature/poetry (and a great review of figurative language and poetic devices).

A must have for any swiftie!!

This book gives a deep dive into some of Taylor's best lyrics. I love her songwriting and it was really interesting to see her lyrics annotated and analysed. As someone who did English a level, this was very much up my street.

The analysis often gives a deeper meaning to the lyrics, encouraging you to see the song in a whole new light.

Loved it!!

I approached Stars Around My Scars with an open mind, first because I appreciate and enjoy Swift's songwriting and second because I found this project to be truly fascinating. In the end, I have to say that this is a venture that left me slightly disappointed, for it had the potential to be so much more than it ended up being.

For starters, I believe that the decision not to liken the book's layout to a more canonically academic formatting/editing was a missed opportunity, because not only did the scribbled text seem chaotic, but it looked (to me) to be less accessible due to the font, color and spacing issues. Furthermore, the author's oppositive stance on high/popular culture (more on this later, but to sum a complex conversation up, it seems to me that McCausland rejects the notion that Swift's writing could possibly be prerogative of popular culture) I would've expected a more academic approach (given the plenty elements that nod towards that route, such as McCausland unironically dubbing herself a "Professor in Swifterature" and this book itself using terms such as "annotated poetry", like academic texts do). Instead, what meets the reader is an interesting hybrid, not quite academic (despite the plethora of borrowed, technical terminology), not quite educational (McCausland does not purport to teach its readers about literary analysis, nor does she intend to), but also not quite fully "for fun". The text takes itself quite seriously, but the work does not—a much richer body of text would've been created, had that been the case.

Indeed, I found that this book does not quite know what it aspires to be. Sure, it is an annotated "poetry" manual, with its literary analysis alright, but I felt like the poetical work was only an assistant to its deeper purpose: demonstrating that Swift is a capable enough writer to be deemed a poet and not just a *gasp* songwriter. Undoubtedly, a lot of meticulous effort went into the analysis of Swift's works, but most often the flexing of literary devices (though showcasing an impressive knowledge on the author's part), the purported intertextuality (though really stimulating) didn't really go anywhere, consistently mentioned but rarely explored; i found it a, frankly, mechanical attitude to poetry: merely being told x lyric is a polyptoton without telling me what it is trying to say or why that polyptoton is important to note and why it being there enriches the text and its meaning, what it reflects etc. doesn't really infer anything of note on the reading of the text other than "wow, she used a polyptoton, very impressive".

As I mentioned before, the author, in her introduction (that uses zero citations, so we have to take her word and her word only as gospel) discusses the divide between high culture and popular culture*, with a very clear penchant and bias for the former (from the introduction: "the idea that it would be radical to consider Swift a poet needs some unpacking, not least because of what it tells us about an apparent mismatch of the public imagination between "high" culture and "popular" culture"). Given this, it makes sense how and why this book feels less like an attempt to properly discuss Swift's penmanship and rather a valiant attempt at proving that her songwriting is as strong as a poem, despite being a *gasp* song. Disregarding the fact that, thought Swift has clearly a knack for poetical writing, she’s made songs (that, despite sharing similarities with poems and literature, ultimately work in different ways) her preferred medium of expression.

Ultimately, the idea is bold, ambitious and commendable, but it unfortunately had a strained execution. In the end I was left disappointed, absolutely not because """this is an analysis of a work of "popular culture" and it therefore has no business being analyzed this way""" (it wouldn't be the first instance of this happening, after all, Easthope literally tells us that: "Both literary and popular cultural texts operate through a system of signs, meanings arising from the organisation of the signifier, so both can be analysed in common terms."), but because, in the end, in her quest to demonstrate and elevate the poetic character of Swift's writing (to the point that she mentioned ad nauseam the literary term "pathetic fallacy" even though it only truly applied a couple of times, this, too, felt like an effort to akin Swift to the great poets she herself loves so much, the Romantics, who are famous for loving this type of literary expression), Mccausland divided the apparent "high culture" element (the lyrics) from the "popular culture" element (the music), completely disregarding the latter one. By acting as if the song lyrics were never song lyrics, but poems, the text is denaturalized just enough to render any attempt at analysis incomplete. It would be like analyzing a manga's story, but ignoring its visual components. It's in the commingling of music and lyrics that the text is created and its real meaning can be inferred. Indeed, some annotations felt redundant, tautological and that's because the author was attempting to extract from them the meaning that could've easily been exposed by keeping the musical scope of the song in mind as well. Swift does not write merely poetry and, though we can of course use literary analysis to parse her texts, I think that her work still has to be handled in a way befitting to its genre. Otherwise, McCausland should've fully embraced the genre distortion by setting up the appropriate academic scaffolding/framework, with citations and footnotes and proper intertextual work.

Despite this, it would be remiss of me to ignore some of the best and most successful analysis of this book: of course, Swift's most lyrical poetry albums were more suitable to this exercise than others and, so, I thoroughly enjoyed McCausland flexing of her literary analysis muscles on folklore and evermore. But, more than anything, the author did an amazing work on Innocent and Nothing New. Even though I think her work truly culminated with her analysis of Seven. All in all, I think that what McCausland did was very impressive, the sheer amount of songs analyzed is remarkable and the attempt at creating a Swiftian canon in such an eloquent way is awe-inspiring, it's always nice to see art being treated as such and not as a product to be consumed.

This book was great! I'm not a Swiftie, per say, but I love her music. I think anyone who is a fan of hers will love and appreciate this book!!!

I would recommend this book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This was SUCH a fun read for a Swiftie! It was really interesting to see someone else’s interpretations of Taylor’s lyrics. There were some really fascinating lyrical connections that were made that I had never considered before and made me think about some songs in a new way.

Taylor Swift IS the music industry!!!!!!!!

This was a great read! Admittedly, I am a lifelong, die-hard swiftie - I've been to every tour she has ever done, I've interacted with her on tumblr, and I know all the lore because I witnessed it in real time - so I've had a lot of time to sit with her lyrics, and there wasn't much in here that I hadn't seen or thought about before. BUT, I do still think this is worth the read, and worth my money. Elly McCausland goes line-by-line on some of Taylor's best - and most underrated - songs, showing themes and patterns that are hard to pick up on when you're jamming out in the car, and not looking at the words on paper in front of you. This book is perfect for the casual fan, the new fan, the younger fan, who may want some guidance analyzing Taylor's work. Taylor Swift is a poet after all, a modern Shakespeare, and her words deserve the same attention we'd give to any other literary genius, I'm glad this exists!

I do think some of the line-by-line lyric analyses could have been a bit more detailed, with better examples of how Taylor explores specific themes in the same/different ways across multiple (4+) eras-spanning songs, but I acknowledge that this is one of the first books of its kind, and I hope more like it are published in the future.

A recommended read for anyone who wishes they could take a college class on Taylor Swifts song writing but is no longe in college.

I was so excited to read this book but it wouldn’t open for me from the NetGalley app 😫 but it sounds like a really interesting read

Such an interesting book! It was lovely to look at way too familiar lyrics in a different way. Just perfect for Swifties and poetry lovers!!!

As someone who wants to read more poetry but doesn’t know where to start this is perfect! I have always believed that music and especially lyrics is a literary art form in itself and is this book is a great way to introduce others to this idea. It not only breaks it down but opens a conversation to critical thought around the building of the poetry.
As a Taylor Swift fan this was so much fun to read. I also did not listen to the songs as reading but I would HIGHLY recommend reading each passage as the song plays in the background to enhance the experience.

I love Taylor Swift and poetry so this was a great read for me to see her lyrics analysed and see the different meanings.

I love Taylor Swift's words as much as her music so this book, which analyses her songs as poetry, is right up my alley. A perfect read.

Interesting subject matter. I love TS and her music so this was a natural fit for me. The book was a little difficult to read digitally due to the size of the pages. It was also weird to zoom in and read it in pieces. The actual book is much easier to read. Enjoyed this one.