The 52th review 45th BOOK "Everyone I Love Is A Stranger To Someone"

This book is very good, this book has an amazing story that can interest the reader. And I have read this book more than once. You should read this book! By Rifaldi Fauzan

Annelyse Gelman is a fearless writer. Unafraid of vulnerability, of her own sublime awkwardness, of delving deeply into pain, she reaches out towards her readers with her emotional transparency, which is never mawkish, never self-indulgent, but self-aware, wise and ultimately very funny. This is a writer who can hold the ultimate cognitive dissonance in her head, whereby everything is utterly meaningful and everything is utterly meaningless – the book’s title reflects this and so do many of the poems.

Gelman’s style is playful without being cloying, funny without being shallow, fast-paced without being manic. The balance she achieves in these poems is breathtaking – a tightrope walk between the ridiculous and the sublime. She has a way of following threads of thought and (what appears to be) free-association through labyrinthine meanders into deep meaning, sharp emotional hits to the heart. It is clear how crafted, how considered, these poems are – the apparent randomness is obviously not at all random. Gelman has a way of injecting such levity, lightness of touch and energy into these poems whereby the reader experiences some of the poems as a spontaneous, direct rant. That Gelman can hide her effort and craft is a testament to her talent, such direct emotional connection in poetry is rare.

The voice in the poems is declarative: ‘Life is possible because we fall in its direction/ and/or because we keep our distance’; and intimate: ‘The migraine surges at fake noon/ and I holler turn the sun off. God, it’s bright in here. / Everything I see is contaminated with light’. There is a sense that as the reader you are being drawn into deep intimacy, you are privy to the poet’s best anecdotes, biggest hurts, most complex existential quandaries, her ‘factory/ of regrets and … stupid objects’. However, it’s not heavy, it has the emotional effect of sharing a load, rather than being burdened with one. Gelman’s poems say Here am I, in all my messy glory, and I really SEE you, in yours. She says in ‘Selfie’.