Customer Reviews

Emotions: Love Made Courageous

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Twenty-year-old Poet Milena Alvarez came to America at age 11 from Cuba, learned English, and began to write poetry and romance novels. Currently, in addition to this book, she is working on her first novel.

Poets, possibly the most honest writers of all, are diggers of the deep. They mine, like gold, precious understanding of humanity, both as a whole and as individuals.

Gomez, though only 20-years-old and venturing onto her life's path for the first time on her own, has dignity and insight uncommon among young adults today.

She explores, through this small volume of poetry, the courageous heart one must have to experience love in its many forms: unrequited love, forbidden love, admiration, fragility of love, love at first sight, friendship and more. Her comparison of love, judging a new love based on the past stuck with me, as did her poem, "Somebody's Everything."

Gomez explores through poetry some of the darker sides of love, such as the loneliness of unforgiveness, one-sided love and cutting the ties of love when necessary.

I'll look forward to more works from this writer as she matures in technique and gains experience. Her love of life and mankind shines through in the brief words of each poem.

"The sun dims a little,
Darkness wins against the light.
The streets sink to make an ocean,
No rainbow colors in the sky."

Milena is a college student, majoring in Literature. She loves romance novels and is currently working on her first novel and another book of poetry. In this work, there are three poems that stand out as perfect representations of emotional conflict and decisions made by a woman who understands love. In "To Part," Raindrops are tears and the streets become an ocean. You can feel the hopelessness of the relationship or the storm. When you are in love the world seems more vibrant and here the contrast is no rainbow in the sky.

"For My Heart's Sake" speaks of the inevitability of change, the ending of a relationship. This poem is filled with care and concern that is subtle and beautifully expressed in the line: "For your sake, I will leave silently."

There is an undercurrent of longing in many of the poems as Milena expresses the desire to be more than friends with a love interest who seems to have become forbidden fruit. The poem that surprised me and reminded me of my college days was "I'll set you free." When I was Milena's age I also wrote about caged birds.

Milena Gomez Alvarez seems to be exploring love's nuances. She explores the temporary quality of infatuation and her desire to be in love with a man who is as much her best friend as the lover of her dreams.

"We make our own destiny;
Our Choices right or wrong,
True love does exist but if only we believe,
Together you and I, all there is to be."

~The Rebecca Review

Here is a short book of poetry that you will read (over and over) for a long length of time. Instead of writing poetry on just life, fiction, and/or "what ifs", the author writes on the varieties of emotions.

I read one or two poems each night before bed. Then I allowed myself to sleep on it. Sometime during the next day my mind would think back to what I had read the night before. I came to realize that the author, Milena Alvarez, did not just write about her own emotions, but about MINE! The collection proved to me that by fully opening herself to her own emotions, Milena Alvarez could more easily see and understand the emotions in others.

***** The old saying "Never judge a book by its cover" holds true in this case. The cover has an attractive color scheme; however, it does not really draw the eye from anyone who may be simply passing by the Poetry section. (Perhaps if the cover looked more like an old journal?) Yet those who happen upon this gem WILL read it more than once, as well as, share it with friends. *****

Reviewed by Detra Fitch of Huntress Reviews.