Mouthful of Forevers is a poetry book by Clementine von Radics that pulls at the heart strings. She reaches out to her readers, sharing her story in poems and prose. She manages to elicit emotion with every page, every line.
Normally, I’m not a fan of romance or love poetry. I tend to like the grittier, darker verses. But, she makes me rethink that decision, drawing me in with the sweet lines and holding me with the raw, heart-wrenching ones. She creates beauty with poems about love, about life, about turmoil and surviving. She writes of bad relationships, friendship, adventure. She doesn’t just write for the lovelorn and broken-hearted. She writes for everyone.
In I Stopped Going to Therapy, her words taught me that it was ok to have jagged edges.
In Advice to Teenage Girls with Wild Ambitions and Trembling Hearts, her words remind me that women are capable of anything. We are brave, and we are strong, and we should never back down.
In The Poet Finally Drops the Bullshit, her words walk me through relationships: the good, the bad, the ugly, the vicious. In this poem, and several others, she touches on subjects that most avoid, like domestic violence, rape, the treatment of women in social media.
I’ve read her words numerous times, and I find myself taking something new from them with each read. With each poem, I found myself wondering if she knew me somehow. Her voice is clear, as a writer and as a woman. I look forward to losing myself in her words again.