I’m so happy that I got the digital ARC of this book! I’ve always been a die hard swiftie so to see an annotated book of some of her top songs… was truly a dream come true. During the release of TTPD, I had wanted a coffee table book that featured her songs since she truly is an incredible artist, writer and all around talented human.

I recommend this book to all swifties- would recommend also adding in your own annotations too! What a great idea!

A deeper dive into Taylor Swift's lyrical artistry. As we progress through the eras, we find our poet has woven even deeper meaning into her songs. Elly’s notations and summaries after each song give greater insight to the reader. Would be a great purchase for anyone who loves poetry and Taylor Swift. I downgraded to 4 stars because to the lay person, some of the annotations are too technical. Yes, there is a glossary of terms in the back but I would have personally enjoyed reading more if I didn’t have to refer to said glossary multiple times while trying to read the annotations. I also consider many Swiftie’s who are your and will be quite drawn to this book. I tried to share with my eleven year old and she couldn’t be less impressed. Maybe the intended audience for this book is scholars and not just fans of Swift.

I really enjoyed this book and wish I could travel to Belgium and take Dr. McCausland’s course! I enjoy literary/poetry analysis so I did know what to expect, and honestly, have often thought about printing out all her lyrics and doing this myself sometime, so I was tickled to see this be a book.

There were a few little connections that I maybe would have drawn that she didn’t, and, as others have noted, while I do enjoy this type of analysis, I don’t actually know all the terminology, so it would have been nice not just to have the glossary but to have had an explanation of what each instance of the literary device adds to the work.

For me, I was sort of singing the song to myself as I was reading, but as others have pointed out, there is really something missing from the experience when the actual music is not incorporated. I think for me the ideal experience would be to listen to the song while reading the lyrics at the same time, since I do really love to read, and being able to physically see them does help me to see some of the attributes better, but… of course if I have to pick between the two, I will pick just listening to Taylor every time, as that is the medium she really chooses to express herself in. However, not that it ever really was in doubt, of course she is a poet. She is a beautiful writer, who has authored extremely gorgeous lyrics for years. It was a treat to get to read them and enjoy some analysis from a pro.

4.5 stars
Poetry doesn’t have to be obscure and poets don’t have to be penniless. I think everyone who tries to deny that Taylor Swift is a poet should read this book. It’s obvious to her fans and should be apparent to all at this point. Swift has words within her and stories to tell. Everyone who hears her songs and reads the words knows this to be true.
I really enjoyed this book/analysis and how it tied back imagery from previous songs and commented on the different forms and functions in the structure of the songs/poems. Yes, I did listen along with each of the songs as I read the book! The only complaint I have is that Cardigan wasn’t analyzed.
*Thanks to Andrew McMeel publishing and netgalley for the advance reader copy

I loved the idea of this book and while I enjoyed parts of it the finished product left me a bit underwhelmed and disappointed. I didn't find myself reaching for the book and eventually, I had to make myself finish it. 2.5/5 from me, but I'll round it down to 2 stars.

If you need help in your English class and love Taylor Swift, this will be a great book to have on hand. While I enjoyed the summaries provided after the lyrics, I found many of the notations to be a tad farfetched. While this is a nice book to have on hand and occasionally reference, it was dull as a cover-to-cover read. I'm sure many people will love this analytical look into the poetry of Taylor's lyrics, but I found it all a bit much. If you enjoy the assignment of literary terms to lyrics, this one is for you.

The premise of this book sounded really promising. I'm a huge Swiftie and I always like to know more about Taylor and her songwriting and how it can be interpreted. The book obviously couldn't cover all of her songs, but the selection was interesting and diverse and showed different sides of Taylor's songwriting.

The book itself was captivating to read and to see other ways to interpret and understand the songs on a more lyrical note. I just feel like that the book wasn't for me. It didn't really catch me and I probably already forgot about most of it in a few weeks.

This book is perfect for people who love language and poetry and maybe know more about it than I do. I still enjoyed it and had fun reading all the annotations.

You could really see that the author is passionate about not only Taylor Swift and her songs but also about poetry and finding ways to interpret and see thing in a different light.

Thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for this EARC!

Nice concept, and I enjoyed seeing someone else’s thoughts on some pretty wonderful songs. One thing I didn’t love, though, was that some of the notes didn’t seem very insightful. It was almost like some comments were meant to fill space, especially in the earlier songs. I started to see at trend of more comments in songs on the later albums and the older songs were sparser, which makes sense, but I feel like some comments were added just to make the older songs look just as “full.” I also felt like there could have been more songs added. An entire book could have been written on this just on The Tortured Poets Department. Overall, a very enjoyable experience. I just wish there was a bit more.

The premise of this poetry collection was interesting, treating Swift like a poet, however, the final product was a little underwhelming. Would make a good book to selectively skim through but not a cover to cover

4 stars ⭐️
I really enjoyed this!! the analysis of each album with each song was easy to follow and definitely gave me new insight into the storytelling of each album + songs on the album. there were a lot of common themes, especially that tied together from different albums and it was neat to see this invisible string! One thing I would’ve like tho is if the glossary appeared at the beginning of the book so i could’ve gotten an overview of each literary device beforehand going into each album/song, instead of the glossary appearing at the end of the book. otherwise, it didn’t take aware from the enjoyment so it would’ve a huge issue, just something small that would’ve been nice. Would totally recommend to all swifties out there but especially the ones who are interested in learning and diving deeper into each of Taylor’s narratives.

Thank you NetGalley for providing this copy in exchange for an honest review.
Taylor is one of my favorite artists and the dissection of her lyrics has always been a curiosity.
This book provides precisely that.
It was a surprise, and I've learnt that I'm not that far off on my independent interpretations.

This unique text dives into select Taylor Swift' songs as poetry, complete with annotations breaking down the lyrics line by line and summaries at the end of each song going into even more detail. As a Swiftie and English major, this was something I was excited to dive into. I do think this would work better as a physical copy. I found myself wanting to highlight and add my own notes and a physical copy would make it easier to flip to the much-needed glossary at the back of the book - there are lots of terms I didn't know off the top of my head. While this was an interesting read, I wish it went a little deeper. With that said, I have long been deep into Swiftian lore, so I've heard many analyses of Swift's lyrics. For someone just getting into the fandom or for someone who wants to learn more about the mechanics of poetry, this would be a great pick!

A quick, fun read for Taylor Swift lovers or English/poetry lovers as well. Full of the authors handwritten annotations you deep dive into different songs from all the albums to prove Miss Swift’s a lyrical genius, and not just some “pop princess”

She is an icon, a master at poetry and story weaving throughout her songs.

The book offers a literary analysis of some of the songs in Taylor Swift's discography, era by era, drawing connection to poetic figures of speech and relevant authors in the English corpus.

I appreciated the passion with which the author approached the task. The analysis focuses more on the style and less on "paternity test" (aka, who's this song about?); however, I liked that certain figures were linked between songs and albums, showing extended metaphors beyond the single song.

If I can offer one critique, is that I would've liked to see more analysis of the albums as a whole, instead of focusing only on single songs. Swift has been described as an "album's artist", and her curation of the tracklist and the story narrated throughout the album is an important part of her artistry. If songs are the chapters, albums form the complete manuscript. I would've liked to see a literary analysis of that, how characters appear and disappear throughout, and how a coherent story is formed out of seemingly disjointed parts.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC.

This was so interesting! As a Taylor Swift fan who has always been a lyric person, I enjoyed reading someone else's annotations of songs I've heard tons of times before. The author's notes pointed out little things I'd missed before and she did a great job at drawing parallels and pointing through-lines that I'd never noticed. Loved this!

This was really interesting! I found the analysis fascinating, but I especially liked the format of the book with all the handwritten notes. It made me feel like I was reading someone's English homework but in the best possible way :P

This work is intended to analyze Taylor Swift’s oeuvre by way of lavender-penned marginal annotations and poetical devices. To an extent, it succeeds; it introduces devices and concepts like epizeuxis, spondees, and polyptoton to readers that otherwise likely wouldn’t know these terms or how to apply them. On the other hand, the work as a whole feels meandering and superficial at times; while it uses the basic language of poetry analysis, it doesn’t delve much further into its analysis. As a result, it feels simultaneously too academic for the average reader and too elementary for academics or those who’ve studied English at more than a passive level. I have an English degree and found this tension disconcerting and frustrating. The book’s formatting was also indicative of this tension.

Still, I’d recommend this to “Swifties”, particularly those who want to learn more about writing, poetry, and literary analysis and need an interesting hook to get them there.

This review was written with temporary digital access to an ARC of the book. Thank you!

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 its 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.

Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review!!

I’d say I’m a pretty hardcore Swiftie as a 32 year old who’s more or less grown up with her music/alongside her in age. I thoroughly enjoyed the parts of this book I could understand — there were a lot of big words in poetry that my brain couldn’t comprehend (and while it’s nice to have a glossary of terms, without a physical book to be able to flip back and forth to read what a word meant, it was null in my experience). I also didn’t necessarily agree with quite all the points being made, and felt that other strong points of songs were missed entirely (read: me internally raging that “why would we not dive into this!?”).

I think this book would be perfect for the poetry and literary buff who also loves Taylor, and I think other Swifties can still enjoy it, but I may not be the niche demographic (again, I’m no poetry buff and didn’t understand what some terms meant) and this isn’t the fault of the author in any terms. I enjoyed this for what it was worth to me: a fellow Swiftie doing a deep dive on her lyrics and I appreciate the poetry/literary break down.

And just as a side note: there was no way for me to download this and send to my Kindle. This may not mean much to most, but this meant I had to read only on the NetGalley app on my phone and after 9+ hours of working on a computer, I appreciate e-ink for my reading and find it much more forgiving for my eyes.

A fun read for Swifties, especially those who were also English class nerds. Amazing how many times you can listen to her music and miss focusing on all the poignant lines and double meanings hidden throughout. I also discovered about some references to literature that I didn’t catch until reading this, and those make me happy.

While I definitely think Elly McCausland achieves her goal of making the analysis approachable, I did have to look up some terminology (which were repeated enough that by the end I learned them). Then I discovered that at the end of the book there is a glossary, so heads up on that. Also, I would have liked there to be more songs included – there’s so many more favorites that I’d love to see McCausland’s thoughts on.

If you love Taylor Swift’s music, easter eggs, and lightbulb moments, you will probably enjoy this too. Thanks to Andrew McMeel Publishing for the ARC!