We Were Young

I first started following Fortesa on Tumblr and quickly fell in love with both her writing and her personality through the screen. She has gotten me through some of the hardest times of my life with her writing alone and I have now finally bought one of her books. I am at a loss for words to even begin to describe how captivating this book is. An absolute must read.

I read this too quickly and I felt myself so into the words that I sometimes had to put it down, cry, or take screenshots and share with friends. Recommend for anyone who wants to feel poetry.

Good book.

I adore this book. I adored the first one. Fortesa is an amazing writer, brings me to tears each and every page.

Fortesa is an amazing poet who manages to capture so delicately the pain and solitude of early adulthood and mental illness. This book has become one that I carry with me almost everywhere I go so I can find comfort in her work. An amazing collection.

Fortesa Latifi captures every emotion any of us have felt going through life. I've read this book multiple times and can't wait to get my hands on her next one!!!

I'm generally not a huge fan of poetry but wow, this collection really hit home for me. Fortesa is really able to capture a lot of the feelings that I've experienced through my four years of college. It's similar to how the lyrics of a song seem to perfectly match your life and seem to written for you. I found this book to be a huge comfort and I'll often go back to reread certain poems to help me through a rough day.I highly recommend "We Were Young" for anyone in high school or college.

There is a quality to Fortesa’s writing that is incredibly accessible. Her poems are easy to read, easy to relate to and most of all - powerful. You will find pieces of yourself, your best friends and all the people you love within theses pages. There are words and lines in this book that stay with you, that refuse to leave your mind. Poems with teeth, poems that bite down and leave marks on your skin, but in the best possible way because you want them to stay with you.

He is the water and depending on the day, you can either breathe or you can't.I really enjoyed this collection, and it was even more exciting because I think I recognised some of the poems - or at least certain lines - from years ago when I used to see a lot of poetry floating around on tumblr. That only added to the nostalgia for me - and nostalgia is definitely a theme in this poem. It's about being a teenager, being reckless, drinking too much and living too wildly, parties and nights out and hangovers and mistakes. It's about the way we look back and see things layered in gold, remember our lives as more glitzy than they were, and shake our heads at ourselves for never recognising the good times when they were happening.There were really powerful images throughout, and again, this was a collection where I found something that resonated with me in almost all of the poems. If I could compare it to anything, I'd say a modern Great Gatsby - the aesthetic of that movie, of everything being polished and beautiful with grit lurking just underneath the surface. It reads almost like a story, which I loved. The speaker was her own character to me, and I'd love to read more about her.In terms of issues, I had a problem with the formatting of the ebook, as I think some of the poems got scrambled up a bit - there would be some poems with a page all to themselves, and then others where there was a poem and a half per page, or a title and the first line of a new poem at the bottom of another poem, and it was all a bit of a sprawling mess. I don't believe it was intentional - if it was, my bad, but it interrupted the flow a bit for me.Overall, liked this collection a lot and would definitely recommend!