I was not able to finish this book. It was of no fault of the book itself, it just was not content that interested me and I had a hard time with the format. It makes me add a star rating— it is of no consequence to the book.

Lovely collection! Very strange, experimental, often uncomfortable, i immediately bought their novel, Polar Vortex! Very interested in their brain

I'm gonna be honest, I knew there was a big chance I would not like this before I chose to read it but I like giving books a chance and I feel like one of these days I'm gonna really find a modern poetry collection that is experimental and blows me away. Unfortunately this was not that at all. So take my review with a grain of salt because I tend to, by rule, not enjoy these very much.

I didn't connect with this book in general. There was times when it seemed like a poem was gonna get me but it never really did and just left me more and more disappointed throughout the pages. Some pages seemed so extremely experimental that I feel like you really needed to be in the flow of the book and enjoying the ride to appreciate them and in my case it got me further away. I was not a big fan of the collages either but I would still recommend to check the artist and give this a try if you like what you see and if you are generally a fan of similar poetry.
Personally, this was not for me.

Structurally varied and complex, these poems invited me to engage with them in different ways, the change in flow and form were creative and kept me intrigued. The ways in which Mootoo played with style may not be for every reader, but for me, I was swept up in the imagery, scents, and memories that are teased forth as I read. There is a familiarity that Mootoo creates as she traces the history, existence, and love for family, island, and within relationships.

The poems that stuck with me are the ones that recall the mischievousness and inquisitiveness of children, the depiction of intimate longing and devotion, the connection of community, desire, and relationships. I love the play on words, the meanings that they hold for me as a Caribbean native: the scenery, the drinks, the behaviours, all just culminated in me sinking into and rereading these poems. The use of different forms of art were also telling of the familial influence and infused colour into this collection.

Shani Mootoo is a writer/poet who is new to me, but I don’t mind this as I am always on the lookout for work by new poets, so I picked up and read this collection with an open mind. I don’t profess to be an expert on the mechanics of poetry so I can only share my overall feelings and thoughts on reading Shani Mootoo’s collection “Cane Fire”.
Mootoo uses potent words in her poems, but somehow fails to put them to any effective use, and often they require the use of a dictionary. It feels like uncommon words and unusual structures are being used to distract the reader from the fact that there is not much substance in the poems and that there is a lack of vivid imagery being conjured.
Some of the poems are printed over several pages, sometimes sparsely on a single page; this is probably intentional, but unfortunately it results in an awful lot of empty space in the book. It feels like padding.
Overall, having read the entire collection, I am left with a sense of confusion and jumble, and of poems which are too often too clever for their own good. These are personal verses, and I know there is quality poetry at the heart of this work, but it is swamped under so much extraneous and pretentious wordplay.

I’m the first to review it and I realize that this is far from the first review a book dreams of, but bear with me, read the review as a subjective opinion of one reader not a defining one of a professional critic.
Modern poetry is a territory I tiptoe into reluctantly from time to time. I’m not expert and certainly not a tastemaker, just someone trying to expand their reading comfort zone and experience words in many forms.
I usually select the poetry I read at random, but this one was a deliberate choice. I read and enjoyed the author’s novel Polar Vortex and thought well, maybe this’ll be good too.
Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, but it didn’t work for me at all. A good amount of modern poetry doesn’t, but usually I can enjoy a clever or an evocative turn of phrase here and there, find something original, different, lovely. And it wasn’t the case with this collection. It just didn’t work for me at all, didn’t sing for me, didn’t dance for me, didn’t excite.
It went by very quickly, but left nothing behind, no dazzling contrail, not even a glimmer of a distant delight. Maybe it’ll do those things to different readers, in fact, one can hope that it will, but this reviewer was thoroughgoingly un-wowed. Thanks Netgalley.