BOOK REVIEW: LULLABIES hits the right chords, and it HURTS

Lang Leav is an artist. More than just a best-selling author, Leav’s pencil work, which often focused on contemporary vaudeville art, has garnered her an international fan base and exhibit invites across different countries. Her most notable contribution to date is her new book Lullabies, which is a compendium of love poems and proses that soulfully uppercuts the unprepared reader straight in the heart.

The book is the sequel to the surprising best-seller Love & Misadventure. Studying Leav’s style of poetry, she’s someone who had been either hit with traumatizing shockwaves that unscrewed her emotional foundation, or she’s just really good in locating hidden checkpoints that can make the human heart appear ridiculously weak and fashionably feeble. I’d like to pick the latter, if that’s the case.

Lullabies is a cavernous exploration of emotions that have been part of our history as love-struck fools – each page tells a different story, a different experience that many of us can easily place ourselves into.

Despite its obvious depth, readers can draw themselves into the book’s rich canvass of discovery, realization, and tragedy, without losing themselves in Leav’s prejudiced labyrinth of encounters and tragedies.

Melodic transitions

Lullabies has three chapters, and each sounds differently from the last. Ironically, the book has overpowering overtures, which can make any evening slumber song sound rude and hauntingly truthful. Leav’s poems are never soft, each page sprinkled with logical truths and sometimes, irrational thoughts that can lead to unspoken bliss.

The book does not have a silencer plugged inside it; it has a narrative, cloaked in two to five stanza poems that can stretch into a new story, depending on the reader’s level of meditated interpretation.

While each poem was written to look different in structure and message, readers may often find themselves going back. This observation, from this reader’s point of view alone, can make it look like that Leav ran out of emotional gas halfway through the book. While this may not ruin the journey, readers might pre-judge the book as painstakingly repetitive.

There are several poems in the book, however, that sound rushed. This may offend readers looking for a more stylish finish, but Leav knows how to pace the intensity between pages. And that’s one critical factor that will keep you nodding at one second, flipping, and restarting again at one point where we either misunderstood or really did not understood what she was getting straight into.

Just keep the book closer to your heart rather than your brain and you’ll do fine.

More than just a heart tenderizer

Lullabies is an important piece of literature of this generation. The books tries its hardest to excavate experiences that have made love fail desperately in angles where it seemed poised to do a victory dance. Leav did a masterful revelation of (sometimes unheard of) believable experiences to stress an oftentimes complicated and unbearable point, which is for you to find out.

Leav’s second dive will uncork the reason behind all our heartaches. More often than not, the book will try its best to knock on the closed door of our emotions. Stay uncooperative and Lullabies will forcibly open windows of our past or present traumas left by an unrequited love, an unfulfilled promise, or a passionate rhetoric that eventually wounded up pallid and later on, lifeless.

We all had that common experience when love failed us miserably, and Leav’s poetry will leave us exhuming dead memories or revisiting “could have been” relationships that stayed there, immobile and irrelevant, until this book gave color and life to it again.