salt review

 

Salt is a journey through warmth and sharpness. This collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life & pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.

Nayyirah Waheed's salt is a poetry collection that I'd heard a lot about recently. I'm trying to read more poetry, and when I saw it was free on Amazon through Kindle Unlimited (my new favourite way to get ebooks), I pounced on it immediately.

This book is deceptively simple. Don't expect huge, overblown language or complicated rhyme schemes. Rather, the poetry reads like a stream-of-consciousness, allowing the reader to access the most vulnerable and essential parts of Waheed's experience of the world. Each poem, however short (some only two lines), is so starkly honest that it genuinely took me aback. I haven't read something this genuine in quite a long time.

Waheed talks about many hugely important topics, such as toxic masculinity, feminism, the experience of being a black woman, and the idea of radical vulnerability. Some of the poems could be read as a series, and I am definitely going to give this a re-read as soon as I have the time. Particularly because I think a lot of the poems could be beautiful tattoos.

Some of my favourite poems included:

 

I would definitely recommend salt to everyone, even those who don't normally like poetry. It is a quick, easy read that still manages to make you think about topics that are essential to the human experience.

My next poetry read is going to be Yrsa Daley-Ward's bone - I can't wait to tell you what I think!