I Hope You Stay (ARC review)

I’m not sure what possessed me to request not just one, but two ARCS of poetry in February (given that I’m anything but a regular poetry reader), but if there was one month to do it, it might as well have been the month of love. 

I Hope You Stay begins as a collection of poems about heartbreak and those you love leaving you behind, but blooms into a beautiful collection of love poems accompanied by equally cute and gorgeous illustrations of otters in space. I can see why people would connect to Peppernell’s words in both categories, and there were plenty of times that I found myself nodding my head in agreement with the words on the page and highlighting passages that I felt strongly about.

What sets this collection apart is the way it’s written, the modern style which this follows has become very familiar, but whereas I’ve seen prose told through verse, I’ve never seen poems told through prose, which is what a majority of this book tries to do. This definitely caught my interest, and I enjoyed it at first…until I realized how plainly everything ends up being said. 

The messages in this work are powerful to read but they don’t hold the magic that can be sparked by the imagery, ambiguity, allusions, and other strategies used in most poetry. In fact, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any of the common literary devices usually utilized in verse. This ends up making the collection feel almost more like a journal, a series of thoughts, or perhaps a collection of notable quotes. Still powerful messages, but poetic…questionable.

In a more story-like structure, one might expect that the strength of this collection to be the overall narrative, unfortunately, the poems didn’t seem to follow a clear path from start to finish. Instead, they appeared to be gathered up when finished and bound together as they were.

This was only furthered by the fact that the poems switch between who is narrating and who is being addressed, sometimes using ‘I,’ sometimes ‘we,’ sometimes ‘you,’ which all seem to be interchangeable at times, but not at others. This makes it difficult to discern who the main character is and our relation to them as readers. 

I rated I Hope You Stay 2.5 out of 5 stars. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Andrew McMeel for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!