It talks about self-care and being responsible for your own healing and of finding the real meaning of love. This collection is based around mythology and is also about strength, empowerment and self-appreciation. This worked really well for me, much better in fact than deliberately pointed poems about finding your inner strength when faced with heartache or only needing yourself all along anyway, all of which I find isolating. Gradually, the poet (and the goddess) moves from righteous anger and grief to acceptance, forgiveness and a strength to move forward into a more hopeful future, both individually and as a species.

I want to give young, new poets a chance and I am always looking for new talent, but every time I try them out, I end up disappointed.

I appreciated how the different themes were dealt with and also the artwork that was included among the poems. I particularly enjoyed one of her poems about men writing stories and not capturing history in the way Aphrodite might have liked which left more to the imagination. Blurb: Bestselling and award-winning author Trista Mateer takes an imaginative approach to self-care in this new poetry and prose collection, Aphrodite Made Me Do It . You will find grace between these pages and a little sadness, too - the kind that makes flowers grow in all of the places you need them most. Aphrodite Made Me Do It is a collection of prose-poetry, framed as a conversation between the author and Aphrodite, goddess of love, sex and beauty.

I do not even know what compelled me to give this collection a chance, but I am thrilled that I did. It actually feels more like an account of things Aphrodite taught the narrator in anecdotal style, which was a strange approach.Aphrodite Made Me Do It is a poetry collection for every fem, feminist, or fan of the goddess of love. With an enemies-to-lovers romance between a witch and a witch hunter, this YA fantasy series is highly addictive. Bestselling and award-winning author Trista Mateer takes an imaginative approach to self-care in this new poetry and prose collection, Aphrodite Made Me Do It. It feels awful saying that, because each experience is a different one and it's unfair to compare them, but if you put two modern poems by different poets side by side and asked me to correctly match them to their poets, there's a strong chance I'll be unsuccessful. She says there’s some dispute over the reason for our creation but that it definitely wasn’t to be gilded objects.

The feeling and expression of strong emotions acts as the healthy catharsis that can allow poet/goddess/woman to open her heart to the peace, self-love and joy that she deserves.After a poem introducing the author’s voice and relationship to love, she goes on to explain a dream she had in which Aphrodite visited her and asked, “What do you need? I am confident that a lot of readers will feel heard by Mateer’s poetry and I found them to be extremely accessible. But this new wave of poets and their poetry seem to read more like diary entries or Instagram posts than poems.

There are multiple images throughout which felt a little juvenile – they genuinely looked like images captured from google with clip art attached, or were images with poignant quotes on which you’d often see scrolling along your chosen social media platform. My pain has always deserved a voice and I will not deny it that, but I won’t devote my life to it either. Couldn’t even bother trying to comprehend it all together—that I could be bloody and beautiful, that I could be divine and approachable.

This series is beautiful and devastating, somehow making me laugh and cry, tugging at my heartstrings in the best way.