Depression & Other Magic Tricks is the debut book by Sabrina Benaim, one of the most-viewed performance poets of all time, whose poem "Explaining My Depression to My Mother" has become a cultural phenomenon with over 5,000,000 views. Depression & Other Magic Tricks explores themes of mental health, love, and family. It is a documentation of struggle and triumph, a celebration of daily life and of living. Benaim's wit, empathy, and gift for language produce a work of endless wonder.
My Review:
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
I only recently discovered Sabrina Benaim through a friend and I fell in love with her spoken words, which I found on youtube. She has a way of speaking that entrances me and I can't help but listen to her every word. A lot of the poems I listened to her perform are in this book and as I read them I could hear her in my head and it made it a lot more enjoyable knowing how she wanted her poetry to be read/heard. My favourite piece has to be 'explaining my depression to my mother' because of how much I can relate to it. It may not be my Mum but generally people who don't understand depression. I think Sabrina has done an amazing job to highlight such an important topic within her book and she is helping to end a stigma that needs to be challenged. You are probably wondering why I only gave it 3.5 stars. I did have a few problems when reading this book. Firstly, have schools stopped teaching people to use punctuation and capital letters? It seems that Rupi Kaur has started a rather annoying trend. When it came to reading the poems I hadn't heard before, it became a struggle to understand what was being said because I had to keep going back to re-read things due to no puncuation. Being able to know when to pause really helps the flow of a poem or any piece of writing. This made some of the pieces feel bumpy. I also felt that some of the poems were meant only for Sabrina to understand. Don't get me wrong, I related to a lot of her content as I too suffer with depression. But some of them felt like you had to know certain people to get what she was saying or meaning. Overall, I did enjoy this book and think that it is a great mascott for mental health awareness. Although I would be put off buying another of her books as I would rather listen to her spoken words. Amy x
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