Two out of ten, and I want to be exact about where my unfairness starts, because the cheap version of this review is beneath everyone.

Being unfair to this book is very easy, so I want to be precise instead.

Let me clear away the bad objections first, since they're the ones people reach for and they're mostly rubbish. The sneering at this collection is very often sneering at its readers: young, largely female, largely arriving at poetry outside a syllabus and without permission. I've heard men who haven't opened a book of verse since school be extremely funny about it, and their contempt has nothing whatsoever to do with prosody. That it sold enormously is not a criticism. That the subject matter is raw is a criticism of the subject matter, which is assault, and I'm not going to make it.

My actual objection is technical, and I think it survives all of that. Only one device operates in this book: the line break. And the break is being asked to carry everything — emphasis, pacing, revelation, irony, closure. Take any page, set it as continuous prose, and see what remains. In most poetry that experiment costs you something enormous, because the sentence was built to be snapped at that spot and the syntax pushes back against the snapping. Here it mostly costs you a slower reading speed.

Syntax is the missing element. Almost every piece runs on the same short declarative shape. Subject, verb, object, break, subject, verb, object. No subordination, no clause that turns and carries the sentence somewhere the reader wasn't already going, and so nothing for the break to work against. A break in a poem is a small argument with the sentence containing it. Without a sentence that offers any resistance, you're left with a typographical pause, and a typographical pause is not an image or a rhythm or an idea.

The imagery compounds it. Honey, milk, roots, flowers, the body as a garden. These carry almost nothing unaided, and nothing in the book puts them under pressure or makes them strange, so by the fortieth appearance they've stopped meaning anything and are functioning as a mood.

Now the concession, and it isn't a polite one. Hundreds of thousands of people bought poetry because of this, a meaningful number of them went on to buy other poetry, and I have met one of those people and liked her. The directness I'm calling a technical failure is exactly what made these pages usable by readers who needed something to say a plain thing plainly at a bad moment. Books have jobs beyond being good, and this one has done a job.

I'll add this: the drawings are better than the poems!

Two. And if you're about to reply that I don't understand what she's doing, I'd genuinely rather hear the case than the accusation. Show me a page where the break achieves something the prose wouldn't, and I'll read the whole thing again properly.