Letters to My Daughter: Bite-size wisdom from Maya Angelou

Letters to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou
My rating: 3 out of 5 stars


Maya Angelou is a poetic prophet, and this book contains nuggets of her wisdom. At first I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to relate, since I do not have any daughters myself. However, Angelou has one son and no daughters. Her daughter is metaphorical.

I enjoyed reading about some of her experiences and reflections (she is very opinionated!), but the one thing that bugged me was the glaring run-on sentences. Surely this book was edited? Perhaps it was meant to be stream of consciousness, but I found it to be distracting.

It did really feel like Angelou had taken her dear daughter out for dinner and was sharing her sage thoughts about life.

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I used to be obsessed with Plath at one point in my life. Very interesting novel written about her later years through her suicide. She was a haunted, but brilliant, woman.



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Intersex: Raw honest poems and essays

Intersex by Thea Hillman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's easy to tell that Hillman is a poet (she's a San Francisco Poetry Slam champion) and performance artist. I can imagine her reading each of the essays in this book in front of an audience.

Hillman writes of the ache, exclusion, and incredible confusion associated with growing up intersex. I agree with another reviewer who did not like the use of the second person in some of the essays (I too prefer first or third person); however, it raises the constant conundrum of gender pronouns when it comes to people who identify as intersex. Is the person male, or female, or a combination of the two? Second person is so much simpler, I imagine...kind of like when I think of God...it's much simpler to avoid the pronoun.

This book is soaked in sex...Hillman writes freely of her love of sex parties and open relationships, a lifestyle completely alien to me.

Being a monogamous person myself, I preferred the pieces about her struggles in growing up and claiming her own gender identity. This book is a desperately needed piece of literature for a misunderstood community.



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