All the Words I Kept Inside (book of poetry, 2024)

Simple, elegant, and yet very frustrating in the details that are left out rather than kept inside. Poet P. J. Gudka is clearly a follower of Sylvia Plath, a fellow poet who was unafraid to share her depression and all of its ugly heads it rears.

There’s hurt and loneliness in Gudka’s words, but what makes the book All The Words I Kept Inside so difficult is that the cause of these hurts are explored emotionally, but only at a distance. Like a surface level reading, there’s clearly trauma in our narrator’s life, a woman that wants to heal.

It’s like the image of nude girl, crouched and hugging her knees, trying to make her audience feel exactly what she is feeling, but still holding her body back for everyone to enjoy. In that pursuit, I would argue that Gudka is successful. There’s bravery in letting people read one’s thoughts on depression and suicide, but there’s also a certain dishonest attempt to hide why she feels this way, other than the usual parents not listening to their child, or lover feeling betrayed by another lover.

What Gudka needs is nouns, and specificity, and a willingness to share her darkest memories (in detail) to a friend or secret muse. Someone that can read her diary that she keeps locked in a drawer with more than just the emotion, but the actual subject of her paintings she should be trying to create. If Sylvia Plath is the inspiration for the emotion, then a poet like Sharon Olds is needed for the inspiration for explicitness.

If that sounds harsh, that’s because it is, but I’ve been to plenty of poetry workshops and heard much worse. If Eminem can handle a negative criticism, which he gets plenty of, then I am confident Gudka will survive my own mean words!

Silliness aside, I would recommend her book, which is available on Amazon. This is not a paid endorsement, nor am I personally involved in her work. I like discovering new poets and offering my opinions on them. How can we expect people to take our own writing seriously if we don’t take other’s seriously?

As far as the aesthetics for the book go, it has an elegant cover design and overall pleasing effect. There is a lot of blank spaces inside, however, and I had plenty of notes written inside my paperback copy of what I believe is the poet’s first book.