Wives, ask your husbands: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.) This isn't necessarily what readers have come to expect from Jordan Peterson's work. His prior books include a deep (and admittedly fairly dry) academic text on mythology and belief structures and two works that fit within (even as they rise above) the self-help genre. This is something entirely different: a short collection of twenty-six brief poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by Juliette Fogra. Hands down, the worst one is J for Jessamine. Everything about it is just demented and only someone really twisted can think up something like that. Jessamine gets electrocuted to death by her little sister because she's a joyless dolt? Her little sister is smiling as she executes her sister? Somehow the little sister can build a 40,000 volt electric chair? The word "dolt" is also used in the Z poem. Everything about it, the poem and art is just bad. JP is proud of this poem and art because he uses it in his "Wake Up" music video And if you can look past the very shallow conservative politics and unfunny writing, the actual poetry itself is atrocious. To give you an example of how thought out this was, at one point he tries to rhyme wonton with flaunting, in a short story about a mother pushing her daughter towards her passions. But the rhyming and meter of it is way off. If you try to read these out loud, you will struggle a bit trying to figure out what even pacing and rhythm this was supposed to have.

This books comes off as a self-masturbatory writing, coming off as the authors political revenge fantasy of torturing the children of those ideologically different from him, that the only jokes are, “lol, aren’t the left abusing children?” And even for that joke, it falls incredibly flat and obscured by bad writing. This alphabetical collection of four sentence rhymes revels in the torture of children with no purpose or payoff. The author-- a licensed psychologist from clown college-- clearly has a disdain for his patients, particularly youths, and secretly practices on the belief that they deserve the abuse they have endured. Peterson is a narcissist with aspirations of eugenics. Most of the poems in this book are just like this one, but some of them are more uncomfortable, given the topics they deal with. I don't think they are funny, and I certainly think they aren't deep. In the promotional video for this book, Peterson says that his goal was to "investigate the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor". He makes equivalent claims about his other, more serious books. I believe it's some kind of defense mechanism: if you think the book is not good, then it means you didn't understand it, because you are not smart enough to find "the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor". Peterson has the gall to compare his work to the likes of Edward Gorey and Neil Gaiman but that is an absolute insult to their creative genius and consistent hard work.

The RRP is the suggested or Recommended Retail Price of a product, set by the publisher or manufacturer. More haunting still is the realization that, though of course the cases are fictionalized and rendered in poetic form, they're inspired by Peterson's decades of clinical work. The individual children depicted may never have existed (at least under the names they're given in the book), but at the very least they represent an amalgamation of the horrors Peterson has witnessed throughout his career, and that fact alone ought to justify a study of this book. I'm actually seeing Jordan Peterson live soon. I'm not a huge fan, but I think it'll be an alright use of an evening. Somehow he's selling out stadiums. The hype is insane. I wonder if he'll recite some poetry. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Alberta. He earned a B.A. degree in political science in 1982 and a degree in psychology in 1984, both from the University of Alberta, and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from McGill University in 1991. He remained at McGill as a post-doctoral fellow for two years before moving to Massachusetts, where he worked as an assistant and an associate professor in the psychology department at Harvard University. In 1998, he moved to the University of Toronto as a full professor. He authored Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief in 1999, a work in which examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and motivation for genocide. The real horror here, is that the description to sell the book is longer and more thought out than the “book” itself.

For real. At least 3 of the poems are about children being sexually assaulted and for why? Because the parents had non-traditional values. That’s it. There’s no deeper message. There’s no “poetry about injustice and depth of humanity.” For an author who claims to be a counseling psychologist, the concept of trauma is poorly handled here. Which gives further credence as to why this person shut down their counseling practice and was let go of their professor job. This may be one of the worst books I've ever read. It's soulless and poorly written by someone with seemingly no knowledge of nor passion for poetry; the rhyme scheme is far too inconsistent for what is supposed to be a coherent collection, there is no attempt at properly utilising meter and rhythm, other than some sporadic and poor attempts at alliteration no real poetic techniques are used.

I tried, but it's really just not very good. All the poems are short, shallow verses (the rhyme schemes and rhythms are often forced), tend to be nasty rather than funny, and some of them are pretty opaque and muddled in execution and conclusion. The subject matter itself is vile, homophobic, misogynistic and incredibly offensive. He describes this work as something he wrote to 'let off steam' while working with patients who were suffering as the result of these particular traumas which feels incredibly disrespectful.