This was a rollercoaster of a read. Poetry is not exactly my to-go genre and although I have written about it not only once for my studies, I still have to make myself more familiar with it, I believe. Cyrus Parker and Amanda Lovelace (who wrote the foreword to this poetry collection and is the addressee of its 2nd half) have shown me a side of poetry I did not encounter at University besides all Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Dickinson and Co. Thank you.
I read this collection as if it were a novel and I will not lie, I was thrilled and excited reading this. Having been following Parker on social media for a couple of years, I feel like I followed DROPKICKromance come to live.
The collection is highly personal and in my opinion, it is very brave to share an insight this intimate into one’s life. The poems’ length ranges from a couple of lines to a double page, only one stanza or a couple. Mostly written in free verse and without capitalisation, Parker utilises indentions, and line alignment to transport his messages. He writes about the meaning of love and its changing notion over time: about the pros and cons of loving, falling in and out of love, and finding oneself in the process.
I am unsure about the aspect that for me, the poems do not stand on their own, but only get their meaning and importance in the context of the whole collection. Read on their own, the poems are not nearly as powerful as they are together. Some poems are even rather insignificant on their own but put together, the poems form a story of a whirlwind love story showing that romance is not dead and can be found even in the most unlikely places (and at most unlikely times).
It is just a small detail, but the layout of the collection is, although minimalistic, very good.
If someone has no previous experience reading poetry, this collection would be the perfect start. Easy to understand, with an underlying universal theme, DROPKICKromance is what it says it is: a dropkick romance.