Customer Reviews

Teen Angst: A Celebration of Really Bad Poetry

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Far from being the promised "pee your pants laugh fest", Teen Angst is an utterly generic - and bland - collection. Although one of two of the poems evoked a grin, for the most part, these are thoroughly unremarkable, and a far cry from being "so bad they're good". I found the blurbs leading into each of the entries much more interesting than the actual poems, establishing the context in which each was written, but still felt as though something was missing. Great idea, but strangely unfunny.

I was actually looking forward to getting Teen Angst in the mail, but after reading through it, I was disappointed. I found only a few poems to be even remotely funny: 4 exactly. The rest were just really bad poems. The introductions to the poems were often humorous, but the individual poems consist of hardly any humor. I felt as though I was grading an 8th grade English class' poetry assignments. Of course, that's what some of these poems are...Certainly NOT the pee-in-your-pants laughing I was promised.

The first and definitive work of its kind, this anthology contains poems written in the heat of intense adolescent emotional distress and introduced by the now angst-free adults who wrote the poems. Although these authors lack the literary pretentiousness enjoyed by true poetasters, their work is equally terrible. Arrangement is by such adolescent-appropriate topics as Breakups--I Will Never Love Again Poems and I Am Alone--and No One Understand My Pain Poems, etc.

One of the best parts of this truly comical collection is editor Sara Bynoe's eight step plan for teens interested in writing angst poetry. Bynoe's anthology was inspired by content from her website.

Who'd of thought that the person who would exploit the teen writing poems about being misunderstood by adults, would be the adult that teen became? Sara Bynoe! That's who!

Pure angst magic, wit, and swearing, brought together for you in this fabulous book.

I loved this book. The many angst ridden poems ranged from funny to just plain bad, but all of them were very entertaining for me. I would recommend this book to anyone who has written angst ridden poetry in their teenaged years, and looked back upon it and laughed, and I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys peaking into the mind of an angst ridden teenager with a mocking spirit. I, however, would not recommend it to anyone who takes their teenaged poetry seriously, or who are looking for good poetry, because these are real poems by real teenagers who thought they were writing good poetry (when, in fact, they were not).