Hashtag This Kindle Edition
by Brandon W Lawson (Author)
Reader Review
Twitter and poetry. For too many writers of my generation (i.e., age 50+), those two things might seem incompatible, at first glance. Fortunately, Brandon W. Lawson shows us that the two go hand in hand. His debut anthology, Hashtag This, is a welcome edition to every poetry-lover’s library, as well as a fine introduction to the power of poems for those who may not necessarily pick up poetry collections. Insightful and stimulating, Lawson’s young voice is one that needs to be heard. This is poetry for the Internet Age and as such deserves the widest possible audience. In poems like “#TwitterLockOut” and “#YouTubeTaughtMe” Lawson captures the angst and unpredictability of life in the Cloud, where more and more of us are spending so much (some may even say TOO much) of our time these days.
But there’s more to Lawson’s poems than URLs and RTs. These pieces are accessible to all tastes. The poem “#WishICouldGoBackToWhen” is a cry of nostalgia Thomas Wolfe would recognize: “Things were so fun/Playing under the sun/What I’d give to have it for 1 last time/Now it’s only in my mind.” From the political to the personal, Lawson’s poems have a universality that transcend the all-too-compartmentalized WorldWideWeb we all are too attached to and too dependent on and too much in love with. There’s no better guide for navigating the Web — and the world at large — than Hashtag This.
