Aphrodite Made Me Do It: Volume 1 (Myth and Magick)

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You will find grace between these pages and a little sadness, too - the kind that makes flowers grow in all of the places you need them most. Bestselling and Goodreads Choice Award winning poet Trista Mateer pulls out some tarot cards and asks for help in her goddess inspired poetry collection, Aphrodite Made Me Do It . It was a short read with beautiful words, but at the same time, it felt like scrolling through someone's poetry-inspired Instagram feed - pretty but easily forgotten. With fantastic chemistry between the two protagonists (who I knew I would be rooting for from their first meeting!

The author uses this dialogue to explore ideas of womanhood, and womanhood in relation to the ideas that the goddess represents: pleasure and pain, love and sex, beauty and the gentle, suffering female.But this new wave of poets and their poetry seem to read more like diary entries or Instagram posts than poems. Aphrodite Made Me Do It is an atypical sort of collection; it felt like a needed step away from poetry which makes a bouquet of the trauma and pain of its maker.

Its theme is not specific but mainly focuses on love, letting-go-of-past, be-your-self, self-healing etc. There are multiple images throughout which felt a little juvenile – they genuinely looked like images captured from google with clip art attached, or were images with poignant quotes on which you’d often see scrolling along your chosen social media platform.

Scattered between the explorations of weighty emotions are lighter notes, in the form of motivational quotes and illustrations, linked to the theme of that section. Couldn’t even bother trying to comprehend it all together—that I could be bloody and beautiful, that I could be divine and approachable. I opened the book to “start” reading, and ended up reading the entire thing without putting it down.

Reading as a glimpse into the private thoughts within a self-care, healing journal, Aphrodite Made Me Do It is a survivors story that speaks to women everywhere, in fierce and loving tones. I particularly enjoyed one of her poems about men writing stories and not capturing history in the way Aphrodite might have liked which left more to the imagination. Among all these other things, it’s an incredible view on many infamous women of mythology, and it gives a voice to the sides of their stories that we all too often overlook. Aphrodite Made Me Do It is a feminist poetry collection about love, loss, insecurity, pain, and empowerment. After a poem introducing the author’s voice and relationship to love, she goes on to explain a dream she had in which Aphrodite visited her and asked, “What do you need?Known for her eponymous blog, she is now the author of multiple poetry collections, including When The Stars Wrote Back (2020), Aphrodite Made Me Do It (2019), Honeybee (2018), and The Dogs I Have Kissed (2015) which won a Goodreads Choice Award the year of its release. I want to give young, new poets a chance and I am always looking for new talent, but every time I try them out, I end up disappointed. Men said she was the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world, but men are the ones who wrote the stories. Each section (obviously) has its own themes and tones, and speaks to the reader on a different level.

I was a little horrified at an earlier review that said it came across as generic feminist poetry as I actually found this to be quite the opposite. I felt like this book saw me on an oceanic-deep level and spoke to some of the rawest parts of me, while encouraging me to reconnect with myself and the warrior within. It gave me the chills, it made me cry and it gave me so many emotions that not many poem books were able to give me.Here is also rage and sorrow; at the limitations and restrictions of a woman’s given role and taken rights; at the expectations heaped upon the female form and spirit; of the false representations used to define womanhood and thus control it. I think it’s because this book opens our eyes to how/why Aphrodite and Ares fell in love—he celebrated the parts of her that lesser men wanted to rip away.