Book Nook | Editor’s Review of Indie Blu(e)’s SMITTEN

by Hokis, Founder & Senior Editor

SMITTEN This is What Love Looks, Poetry by Women for Women is a masterful celebration of love between women. It is rare to read about the ordinary day of loving and the swirl-wind of feelings of love entwined with the extraordinary complexities of being lesbian or bisexual. Indie Blu(e)’s carefully curated collection achieves this.

After reading you likely come to a couple conclusions; we all love, true, and yet there is a bond between women that is exclusively unique. Love by it’s very nature is an experience which reaches beyond wordly or wordy understanding. The existence of this collection, in addition to the poetry within it, has somehow created an ethos. It allows you to catch a scent that you recognize, and gently expands to fill all senses. The result, for me, was a living inside a 400 page painting of honest love in a world that has yet to fully authenticate its existence.

As I read, I kept reaching to read work related to Martin Luther King’s Strong Love. This project was created with a larger than literary intent. It demonstrates the powerful momentum women create when they support each other; with a shared vision and a single focus of reaching beyond profit and into change making. I cannot think of a better “I see you, you beautiful loving soul” gift.

It is available at all major book retailers, linking you here to Barnes & Noble.

SMITTENPoetry is on Twitter, SMITTENWomen on Facebook.

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Admittedly, I am included in the collection and likely biased. Additional SMITTEN reviews are found below, and are on Amazon Reviews.

“SMITTEN This Is What Love Looks Like; Poetry by Women for Women, compiled and printed by Indie Blu(e) Publishing, is a powerhouse anthology that showcases the voices of women who love women. It is clear from the variety and quantity of poetry and art combined in this work that the subjects found here are a necessity to share and read. Too often female love is overlooked, erased, or written off as a phase or erotica, but in SMITTEN, these outdated clichés and stereotypes are immediately knocked out and replaced by complex stories of love and loss – feelings we’ve all had when falling in or out of love…..”

Indie Blu(e)’s Smitten should be your newest gift of poetry
By Mariah Voutilainen, October 29, 2019

“Before I begin to review Smitten, a book that lays bare and re-frames (in a very personal manner) the love that women have for women, I must be equally open. As I formed my thoughts, I realized that I was (and am) extremely nervous about how to respond to these poems from my own heterosexual, cis female lens. I felt this because I am a woman of color, one who feels the simmering heat of frustration when those who cannot ever know my experience want to take a stab at relating to it. What I can say is the following: While Smitten is a book about women who love women (from every-which perspective), of course, it is about love. And I can relate to love. I can understand first love, last love, forbidden love, unrequited love, the love of someone lost, the love of someone found. The love of someone who saves….”