My Ex Reviewed My Poetry Book
Three stars, two backhanded compliments, one line only I could decode.
At 1:14 in the morning, eight months after we broke up, my ex-boyfriend gave my poetry book three stars. I know it was 1:14 because I screenshotted it at 1:16, sitting up in bed in the dark, glowing like a woman who has just been handed a bomb shaped exactly like a compliment.
Some context. The book is small. Forty two poems, a press run modest enough that my mother personally knows a double digit percentage of the buyers. It exists because I spent two years feeding a monthly poetry contest everything I wrote until enough pieces placed that a small publisher asked if there were more where those came from. There were. Most of them were about Aman.
Aman, who in four years of our relationship read exactly none of my poems. This is not an exaggeration for effect. I counted, the way you count only after it's over. I used to leave drafts on the kitchen table with the strategic casualness of a fisherman laying nets. He would move them to stack his laptop. “I'll read them when it's a real book,” he said once, and I wrote that sentence down in my phone at the time, not because it hurt, but because I already knew I would need it later. Poets are terrible people in exactly this one specific way. We file our wounds under Drafts.
We did not break up over the poems. We broke up over everything the poems were about: the way he narrated our relationship to other people better than he lived it, the way I kept auditioning for attention in my own home. But if you asked me for the moment the ending became certain, it was the kitchen table, the moved stack, the real book comment.
Some relationships end in an argument. Ours ended in an acquisitions decision.
So when the book came out, I did a thing I am not proud of. The dedication page reads: “For everyone who wanted to read them later.”
My editor called it petty. My best friend called it iconic. Both were correct, which is the entire art of a dedication.
And then, eight months later, 1:14 a.m., three stars, under his actual name, a review four paragraphs long. Which means he did not just read the book. He studied it. He formatted his thoughts. He proofread. The man who could not get through a poem taped to the fridge produced four paragraphs of literary criticism with topic sentences.
I will give you the highlights, because I have the whole thing memorised, which my therapist says we can talk about... another time.
Backhanded compliment number one: “The poems about longing are easily the strongest, though the poet has a lifelong habit of romanticising people who were, at the time, simply tired.”
Reader, I gasped... Alone, at night, in the dark, an actual audible gasp, because that is not a review, that is a closing argument.
Simply tired. Four years of me turning his silences into cathedrals... and his verdict is that the cathedral was a man who needed a nap.
Backhanded compliment number two: “Technically she has improved a great deal. The early poems relied on rain. The later ones earn their weather.” The condescension of it. The accuracy of it. This is the special cruelty of being reviewed by someone who slept beside your first drafts: they know exactly which compliments cost you something to hear.
Then the stars. Three. Not one, which would have been rage, and rage would have been flattering. Not five, which would have been apology. Three stars is a man placing a book on the scale with both hands steady.
Three stars, from him, was horrifyingly sincere.
I drafted eleven replies. I want you to know the range. There was the gracious one, thanking him for his careful reading. There was the lawyer one, disputing the rain. There was one that was just the word “tired?” with a question mark, which my best friend physically took my phone to prevent. I posted none of them, partly out of dignity, partly because I had just read an essay about why safe poems lose, and something in it stuck: the poem that risks nothing wins nothing. The same, I suspected, was true of replies. Everything I could safely say to him was not worth saying.
Besides, I was stuck on the last line of the review...
The line for me.
“Page 47 is the truest one in the book, and she knows why.”
Here is what no other reader on earth could decode.
Page 47 is not a poem about him. It is the only poem in the collection where I am the villain. It is about the night of Ruchi's wedding, when we got lost outside Nashik at two in the morning, and he asked me, quietly, both hands on the wheel, whether I actually loved him or loved the person I got to be while describing him. And I looked out the window at the sugarcane going past and said nothing... for eleven kilometres. The poem is called “Eleven Kilometres.” It admits what I never admitted out loud: that my silence in that car was an answer, and I let him drive us both around inside it for two more years because the material was good.
He never read my poems when we were together.
But he was in the car.
He did not need the book to know page 47 was true. He needed the book to know that I finally knew it too.
We were terrible at conversation and brilliant at annotation. Some people can only love you in the margins, and some apologies arrive as reviews, three stars, 1:14 a.m.
Once I understood the last line, the rest of the review reorganised itself in front of me. It was not an attack. It was the conversation we never managed to have, conducted in the only language with enough distance in it for both of us. He was simply tired: that was his side, stated at last, in public, where I could not turn it into a metaphor. The later ones earn their weather: that was him admitting he had watched me get better from across a kitchen he had already left. And page 47: that was him saying, I saw it. You finally said it. We both know.
People ask if I replied. I did, in the only register we ever shared...
I marked his review as helpful.
One click. No words. He would understand it, the way I understood page 47. It was, and I say this with a straight face, the most honest exchange of our entire relationship.
The book is in its second small printing now. The publisher wanted a pull quote for the new back cover, something from the press coverage, and I am telling you the truth when I say I fought hard to use “the later ones earn their weather, three stars” and was overruled by cooler heads.
I am writing the next collection at the same kitchen table. Nobody moves my drafts anymore, which is lonelier and better, in the proportions you would expect. A lot of the new poems are about healing, which turns out to be a less photogenic process than heartbreak: fewer thunderstorms, more paperwork.
But there is one poem, early in the manuscript, called “Helpful.” It is about a man reading a book at one in the morning with a highlighter and a grudge and, underneath it all, unmistakably, love of a kind neither of us could operate.
He will find it on whatever page it lands on.
He knows why.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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