Chloe 1st Edition

It takes dexterity to craft a character as nuanced and simply real as Chloe. By the last page, I felt like I knew Chloe. Like I'd grown up with her. Loved her, envied her, grown frustrated with her, held her hair back at the end of a night of self-destructing. I walked away with an understanding of a person with both a propensity for tragedy and an immense capacity to love. In this piece, Kristina Haynes maintains a balance between beautiful turns of phrase and the heartbreakingly ugly truth of the twentysomething time bomb. (E.g. this line from "Chloe Stop," about Chloe's affair with her high school teacher: "Chloe, don't you think it's time you stopped romanticizing unsharpened pencils?"). While there were lines here and there so sentimental as to verge on indulgent, on the whole this is a work that reaches from the page and grabs you by the throat, forcing you to acknowledge your own similarities to Chloe. I see my own resilience in Chloe's insistence on continuing day by day. I see my own immaturity in her lack of self-control. But at the end of the day, you feel like there's hope for Chloe. Like with time and a couple glasses of wine, she'll find a way to pull her s*** together and move on to "real adulthood," if such a thing exists.

This is one of the most powerfully written collection of poems I have ever read. It knocked the wind out of me more than once.

Chloe, collected, is the mantra of a childless mantra. Is the mantra mistaken for what it is: the giant child, the child giant, in an infancy bereft of nursery.(from Chloe Stop: 'A girl on the street saw you after and turned to say something to her mother. For just a second, you forgot where you were and looked for yours.')

This is the kind of book I want to live inside. It's hard-hitting and beautifully composed. Kristina's work makes it apparent that she is a poet who puts time and effort into her poems. Chloe is no exception. You can tell how carefully the book was loved before being released to others. I wish I had written this book.

Brilliant!

This collection of poetry follows Chloe, a character who is made up of pieces of all of us. Chloe is a disaster, but at least her lipstick matches her nails. She isn't really sure what love is, she makes a lot of bad decisions - but ultimately, she's a fascinating character.I've never read a collection quite like this before. All the poems in this book follow Chloe's adventures, whether she's out partying, drunkenly calling her exes or even getting married - and whilst it isn't a cohesive narrative, it all fits together like a crazy jigsaw puzzle, showing us Chloe in her entirety. Mistakes, desperate desire for forgiveness and so much heart.If you're looking for poetry that follows a character rather than a real person's experiences, this one definitely fits the bill. Many people feel poetry should be 'relatable' to them in order to be good - that's an understandable feeling, but I feel as though reading poems in this way kind of negates that. You can appreciate a character without necessarily relating to them in every way, and I definitely felt that about Chloe. Although I did see many parts of myself in her, there were parts which I didn't relate to - and I enjoyed reading them anyway.I'd definitely recommend this collection, it's unique and interesting and overall just a great read!

One of the best poetry books I own, such a comforting and familiar and beautiful take on early twenties girlhood