The Music Was Just Getting Good: Poems to Grieve By

by Alicia Cook

Some good things must come to an end, for new things to begin. Poet Alicia Cook explores this grievous emotion in her latest and final mixtape collection, The Music Was Just Getting Good.

Alicia Cook is back with the highly anticipated final tracklist in her poetry collection of mixtapes, The Music Was Just Getting Good. Following in the footsteps of her first two installments, Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately (2016) and Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back (2020), Cook is closing out her trilogy with a poignant and all too relatable look at the ebbs and flows of life. And why, even during our most difficult seasons, a better day can appear just around the corner.
 
Spread across 184 tracks (92 poems and 92 blackout poems), each paired with an accompanying song, Cook returns to her evergreen themes of mental health, hope, and recovery, and reminds readers that grief is not reserved solely for death. We may grieve who we used to be, moments that never came to pass, physical places, and, of course, people; people who’ve died, but also those who left, and those we had to leave behind.
 
A stunning closing number in a timely and necessary collection of work, The Music Was Just Getting Good is the balm your soul has been waiting for.

• ISBN10: 1524886203
• ISBN13: 9781524886202
• Publish Date: 9 January 2024
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Andrews McMeel Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

Reviews

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Thank you NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the chance to read and review ‘The Music Was Just Getting Good’ by Alicia Cook.

 

The Music Was Just Getting Good is Alicia Cook’s fourth and final installation in her mixtape series. She does seem to have her devotees; her books average around 3.9 stars on Goodreads, based on 600 to 5300+ reviews. Those who like her style, will like her style. This last book comes out on the 9th of January, is 242 pages long, and like the others in the series is published by Andrews McMeel. The book is not available on Kindle Unlimited, and the kindle version is priced around $8.49.

 

The style of the series is interesting; the book is divided into two sides. Side A has 91 poems, none of which have a title but are called Track 1, Track 2 and so on. Each of these "tracks" is accompanied with a song, which is an interesting way to read these poems. The second half of the book, called 'Side B', is a series of blackout poems based on the original 91 tracks. However, in this second half, each of the poems has different songs than the first.

 

To be clear, I absolutely love Track 27 and I think Alicia Cook has some real gems in this collection. I understand why her fans love her.

 

That being said, I believe that this collection needed to be edited significantly.

 

91 poems and then 91 blackout poems don’t seem to be a lot and then you open the book and they become a lot, especially when the same couple of themes are repeated again and again. Had the author halved the number of poems, the remaining ones would have been given the ability to shine individually instead of being lost in this sea of tracks instead of letting things become repetitive.