Derrick Brown will always have a special place in my journey with poetry.

I found his writing at a pivotal time in my mid-twenties. He performed at Cafe Deux Soleil in 2009 - to this day, he is still the funniest poet I've ever seen. He used music from Sigur Rós and Explosions in the Sky to back-up his readings, a technique I adopted heavily for my own performances later on. He swung for the fences with every poem - the metaphors were dizzying, the puns so bad they were good and the writing was nakedly honest. Brown also didn't sound like any other slam-poets I'd seen. Every other person who got on stage that night delivered their work with the same cadence and rhythm (if you've been to a slam event in the past, you know what I'm talking about).

My brother picked this book up for me recently and I read it in a few sittings. Two-stars feels cold, but I genuinely thought it was just "okay."

Derrick Brown's written voice comes off tired in this book...the metaphors don't hold the same grandeur as his earlier work. I'm also at a different place in life - a little older, a little wiser(?) and I've experienced a mix of good and bad things over the last eight years that have coloured how I see the world. Brown's words feel like they've been picked over in his notebooks - trying to recapture the magic of his early work. Many of the poems feel forced to me, rather than found.

A worthwhile read if you're a fan, but I wouldn't start with this book if you haven't read or seen him before. ( )