"Greekling" by Kostya Tsolakis (Nine Arches Press, 2023)

One way or another I've trouble appreciating many of these poems. It's a "Poetry Book Society Recommendation"

• I don't get the line-breaks of "Tribute of Children". For example, "clinging to her waist like wax-drip on the candlestick" is spread across 3 lines.
• "1991" is 3 fairly rectangular stanzas, yet it reads like prose.
• "freedom or death" uses gaps instead of punctuation - fair enough, but why 9 lines per stanza? Why such short lines?
• "chatroom '99" includes "lol i mean what u rly in2 ;)/ breathless adolescence/ gives way to/ fostering alterity" which I think I get, but I didn't think it means much.
• "First Time" and "Nocturne for the American Boy I Pulled at Popstarz" are the sort of poems that I (a heterosexual) wouldn't have bothered writing.
• I like "marble bf", though I'd prefer the lines at least twice as long.
• "Kostya as a Failed State, 2011-13" grew on me.
• I don't understand the layout of "Anastylosis"
• "Patrick" is a mirror poem (title = last line, etc)
• "Vine" stays mostly on theme - "Gift from my forefather./ ... do your roots absorb/ every voice cast/ in this yard? ... Each leaf you bear,/ a word from an ancestor./ I pick them ... I cling/ to our name - I,/ your very last leaf/ closest to the blank sun" - but oh dear, those tell-tale short lines again.