I wrote about Rupi Kaur — how her poetry is bad and I despise her success, et cetera. I thought that was all I had to say. But then, I was alerted to a poet. Her digital scent wrapped around my sinuses and may have been the cause of at least one of the infections I’ve had in the last year. It was as if, as a Cornell student, I had just woken up in early spring, gotten ready for the day, and stepped outside, only to get punched in the face with that oh-so-pleasant organic fertilizer (manure) that gets threaded into the greenery along every path I take to class. Just replace the fertilizer with Raegan Fordemwalt and you will get the picture I am painting.
According to the biography in her recent book, Prince of Hearts, Fordemwalt is from Boise, Idaho and studies in California. She started writing several years ago and later on, began posting her writing online. She posts daily on her TikTok account and often posts on her Instagram account. Her website hasn’t been updated in a hot second, but that will certainly change soon. She self-published her first book, Lover Girl, as a senior in high school, and it hit No. 1 in multiple categories on Amazon within the first week. She apparently believes that poetry can be made from anything, firmly embodying her stance by regurgitating half-thoughts and doodles onto paper and calling it poetry. I really hate to even call them poems; at least hers seem to have titles, unlike Kaur. But is my vehement distaste for her writing the only distaste? Her books are being sold at hundreds of Barnes & Noble locations across the country. She has, statistically speaking, been uber-successful. She also has a strong following on social media that finds it invigorating to encourage her behavior. Everybody loves Raegan.
Here is my issue: Poetry should be good. That’s it. There is an ocean of rich and masterful literature from poets like Wordsworth to poets like Dylan Thomas. Yet, this is not the literature being heralded and devoured. Let’s dive into Lover Girl first. 230 pages of waste. Random page flip one! Page 124, her poem “perfect for you” reads:
maybe it would hurt less
if she wasn’t perfect for you
in the way i could never be.
I really hate when writers show instead of tell — that’s why I’m a Fordemwalt fan! Another random page flip! Page 16, her poem “hurt so much” reads as follows:
why does it all hurt so much?
why do you hurt so much?
Could we get any more vague? Could we get any shorter? Yes, of course we can, this is Fordemwalt’s poetry!
Her recent collection, Prince of Hearts, came out Feb. 11, 2025. Let’s see if she has at least gotten any better. Random page flip one! Page 104, her poem “true love’s kiss” reads as follows:
i am poisoned, but
i imagine the antidote in your lips.
do it sweetly.
wake me up with true love’s kiss.
i need you.
i was asleep until you found me.
Growth! My goodness, it started off kind of okay, and then she teetered off to the void of blah again. Too bad. Let’s do one more, for good measure. Page 142, her poem “headline” reads as follows:
she’s never had a healthy relationship.
you know this.
everyone does by now.
it’s all she writes poetry about.
Her poems leave nothing to think about, to dismember, to consider. They are words on a page, without implementation of rhyme, meter, literary devices or even content. I will admit, after reading through her second collection, things got a little better. But not a lot. I am going to say exactly what I said for Kaur. This works well for her, journalistically, but it is not quality writing that should have ever seen the light of day. My consensus? Don’t bother with her. Don’t waste your time. I wish I didn’t own these books now. I will probably give them to my dog when I return home during break. She loves amateur writers.
There are some more fundamental issues here. If it wasn’t apparent, her work is nearly identical to Rupi Kaur’s work. Not only are the styles similar — short poems without capitalization and surface-level themes, doodles strewn throughout the book to make up for the lack of poetry — but both books are actually published through the same publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing. Fordemwalt admitted that her first book, at least, was self-published. This is important because it reiterates something I have been preaching for some time now: self-publishing, particularly through social media, has exacerbated the decline of the quality of contemporary poetry by allowing amateur writers to take shortcuts and create an influx of lower-quality writing, which has unfortunately been romanticized by the people of today who have low attention spans and an ignorant disinterest in deeper, more intellectually demanding poetry. This publisher enables the issue at hand. When I went to pick these books up from Barnes & Noble, the poetry section (which was just a few shelves) was filled with books primarily published by — you guessed it — McMeel. Shame on these self-publishing agencies that take advantage of amateur writers stuck in a trend all just to make a few bucks. And shame on my fellow readers and writers who have given attention to this sort of poetry which, quite frankly, gives the genre as a whole a bad look.
In order to not end on such a negative note, I recommend reading “The Plague of Publishing Trends” by Rafaella Gonzalez, which is an excellent article that I think tangents appropriately off of what I am discussing.
Hater Friday runs on Fridays and centers around critiquing media or culture.
Caidan Pilarski is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at cpilarski@cornellsun.com.
