to drink coffee with a ghost Review

to drink coffee with a ghost by amanda lovelace

“You cannot have a funeral for your mother without also having a funeral for yourself.” This book poses the ever-lingering question: What happens when someone dies before they’re able to redeem themselves?

From the bestselling & award-winning poetess, amanda lovelace, comes the finale of her illustrated duology, “things that h(a)unt.” In the first installment, to make monsters out of girls, lovelace explored the memory of being in a toxic romantic relationship. In to drink coffee with a ghost, lovelace unravels the memory of the complicated relationship she had with her now-deceased mother.

Rating:

This book was a title + cover buy. I saw it as I was looking for some books to gift for Christmas, it caught my eye, I skim read a few of the poems to try to see if I’d like it and went “yeah, sounds okay, buy”.

I read it quickly, and gosh, this spoke to me more than I thought it would. My mother isn’t dead, but a lot of what is touched in the book is either things I have encountered myself or seen people close to me live through. A few poems, I felt like someone had taken a peek at my life and gone “this is one of those do or die moments, this was a turning point”.

Before this little book I hadn’t read any of Amanda’s other books because a) I mostly don’t do poetry, but I have sudden bouts of liking it. Poetry in English confuses me, it feels way less poetic and makes less sense than it does in Spanish. And b) her other poetry books have been hyped and I have been burnt enough by “overly hyped bookes” that I mostly steer away from them because they’re 90% of the time not my type of book. I am not sure her other series is for me, but this one, it most certainly is.

One thing that made me smile is that it has an extensive list of trigger and content warnings so you know what to expect when you read it and it won’t shock you or do you wrong as you’ve been warned. Maybe it even helped knowing what may be coming to connect better with it, as I knew what parts of it would speak the most to me.

Now I have ordered the previous book on this collection and I have keep this one in my limited collection of poetry books (so far there’s 3 of them, not counting the one on the way). I guess that is high praise for this book if it is actually staying on my shelves…