The Museum

A Collection of Dark Poetry

Poetry - General
32 Pages
Reviewed on 12/20/2015
Buy on Amazon

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Free Book Program, which is open to all readers and is completely free. The author will provide you with a free copy of their book in exchange for an honest review. You and the author will discuss what sites you will post your review to and what kind of copy of the book you would like to receive (eBook, PDF, Word, paperback, etc.). To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email.

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Review Exchange Program, which is open to all authors and is completely free. Simply put, you agree to provide an honest review an author's book in exchange for the author doing the same for you. What sites your reviews are posted on (B&N, Amazon, etc.) and whether you send digital (eBook, PDF, Word, etc.) or hard copies of your books to each other for review is up to you. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email, and be sure to describe your book or include a link to your Readers' Favorite review page or Amazon page.

This author participates in the Readers' Favorite Book Donation Program, which was created to help nonprofit and charitable organizations (schools, libraries, convalescent homes, soldier donation programs, etc.) by providing them with free books and to help authors garner more exposure for their work. This author is willing to donate free copies of their book in exchange for reviews (if circumstances allow) and the knowledge that their book is being read and enjoyed. To begin, click the purple email icon to send this author a private email. Be sure to tell the author who you are, what organization you are with, how many books you need, how they will be used, and the number of reviews, if any, you would be able to provide.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Rich Follett for Readers' Favorite

The Museum: A Collection of Dark Poetry by Kristen Flood offers a series of spectacularly dark vignettes drawn from several sinister, dystopian museums where humans, deprived of place or purpose, are on display in the form of macabre experiments. In glass-walled cells, they try to make sense of their surroundings and the unbearable suffering each endures for the crimes of being creative and unique in a society with no tolerance for either. Each poem in the collection, written by one of the subjects in the study, is accompanied by clinical notes and a chilling illustration by Jessica Boyer. The prisoner’s words are haunting: “Dead/I am already dead/Enclosed in my own mind/Framed in glass/Encased for your viewing pleasure/Staged as a mockery.”

The Museum: A Collection of Dark Poetry by Kristen Flood is much more than a finely crafted collection of verse - it is really more like a finely tuned work of Performance Art on paper. The world that Kristen Flood has created is so absorbing that the reader must pause after each poem/illustration pairing to re-focus on the stark power of the words. Flood’s macabre vision is so fully realized that it takes a while for the full extent of the horror she has crafted to register. The torments that her “subjects” endure are custom-fitted to their unique talents, custom-designed to prey upon their worst fears, and worthy of Machiavelli himself. Kristen Flood’s The Museum: A Collection of Dark Poetry is a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch painting expressed in indelible verse, darkly eloquent and simultaneously disturbing in provocative and prophetic ways.