The Goodbye Song is an anthology collection featuring 10 poems, sonnets, haikus, letters, scenes, objects, definitions, directions, entries, and recipes that was sent to me by the author. It also won the 2021 American Fiction Award in Poetry: Anthologies.
The poems vary in rhyming sequences; some are abac pattern, (which is personally my favorite when writing traditional poetry since it allows for more flexibility) and some are aabb, and some are in free verse. Free verse poetry takes more skill since the possibilities are endless of what to write, and I struggle with that sometimes. "Sometimes I Cry When I ‘Donate’" is my favorite, not because of the length, but because of the raw honesty and important truths of homelessness and difficult family relationships. "I wish to live in a world where one day parents don’t say/'I worked my whole life for you,' but rather: 'I loved you every day.'" I find sonnets extremely fun to write, as I am very detailed-oriented. The intricacy of sonnets require vast skill and creativity. The author has that in spades.The letters that wrote to inanimate objects or personified ideas and were quite creative and hilarious like "Dear Stomach". (This is unrelated, but I love writing the opposite- from the viewpoint of the object or idea to a person.) But others were also serious in their own way, like "Dear Followers" and "Dear High School". I related to "Dear High School." For instance, I completely agree that the focus of history education in memorization of dates and fights and spelling of them is pointless compared to why's and how's. I also love physical textbooks like the boy named Shaun who 'wrote' it. One of the reasons I want to be a science teacher is because of this line: "Science is exciting, but you didn’t tell me why it was important... and so we became, like all teenagers before us, conditioned to try and not know why."
Of the short stories, the title of the book, The Goodbye Song, was my favorite and most relatable as I hate saying goodbye to teachers and leaving school. Of significant irony, Goodbye by Slipknot is playing on iHeartRadio as I type this. The diary/journaling sections were interesting to say the least. I always tried journaling but I could never actually remember to write in it so the entries ended up being something like this: "Dear Diary- now I'll tell you what happened in my life over the past 5 months." These characters were certainly much more dedicated than I was. Have you ever thought about doing a time capsule, writing a letter to yourself in the future? Well, stop putting it off or before you know it you'll be the age you were supposed to be reading it!
I actually thought going into this that the author was going to write 10 actual recipes that I could try to make; boy was I wrong! These are satires. Good thing I never liked tomato juice. The Nutrition Facts are more like lessons and key takeaways, which I suppose is accurate with the good cultural emphasis on eating healthier and making decisions based on the nutrition label.
I recommend this book! I would put this book in the new New Adult category and I recommend this book for readers 18+ due to some mature content. I would say that one complaint is that it is difficult to determine the audience as some of the poems and short stories are obviously for older adults such as "bedsheets" and some can be for high school students.
Title: The Goodbye Song
Author: Karl Kristian Flores
Publisher: Karl Kristian Flores
Pages: 311
Series: No
Rating: 5 Stars
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