I haven’t read any of her book - I have bought one as a gift for Angel because she is nuts over her work. I have read Faudet’s Dirty Pretty Things that Angel lend me last year. Some people reckons their works are from the same person, tee hee..
Leav is a world-famous poet. You can see her poems regrammed or posted on social media. It is easy to share her work because her poems are just short, suits Instagram. It is so common to see a picture of a page from her book. My only experience reading her is by those poems shared online.
Imagine in high school when you have an assignment to write an eight-stanza poem. The first stanza would be very good, full of inspiration then you still have 7 stanzas to fill. That leaves you 7 boring stanzas which you just want to end. I see Leav’s work just like that - the first stanza. Looks good but incomplete. The idea is novel but just not enough. Her work may not even fill one stanza, more like a verse. And people buy this.
So last month she had a book tour that made it to the Philippines. Fans were excited. Their Instagram idol. Wow. On the other hand, there are bashers. My twitter feed was mostly bashing on her work. Which of course is justified. The poems I read there were funny and really a waste of paper. Twenty words or less in a page is just an outrage. Imagine the trees sacrificed just to be that book.
The Lang Leav bashing however ends with this article by a local poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta:
https://news.abs-cbn.com/ancx/culture/books/02/25/19/leav-and-let-live
Yes it is harsh. Yes it is elitist. The bottom line after this was, a good discussion. Is Leav a good poet? Is her work just for common tao? Is she a sellout? Is she just for instagram posts?
With that, I leave you with some words from Two Broke Girls:
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