Ode to My First Car by Robin Gow follows Claire as she has to come to terms with her bisexuality, her feelings for her best friend Sophia, and the lack of her beloved car whom she endearingly named Lars.

Claire’s journey of trying to navigate the world as a queer teenager in love with her best friend would relate to many people out there. I know as a bisexual individual who’s not out to my family, I related to some bits of her story. Especially as the daughter of two working class parents. More than her experience of her bisexuality, I found that her parents’ struggle to make ends meet and her constantly wishing that money wasn’t a problem was something I carry with me everyday. Why worry about coming out when your family was struggling to pay the dues on your wrecked car? You have more important things to worry about like finding a job and pulling your weight. Don’t get me wrong though, class is not the focus of this book, it’s identity, but I live by the fact that poverty is a state of mind just as much as it is a state of living.

The entire book is written in verse, which I think was detrimental to its storytelling. I found the result disappointing, as I was excited when I first found out this story was written in verse since I’ve seldom encountered a book written like that. I thought it was a unique and creative way to tell a story outside of the poetry genre.

The format of most of these sections contributed nothing to the content, and felt like it was just prose writing cut up into random bits. Rarely was there any clever formatting of a section that complimented the writing. In fact, as I read through this, a friend and I would take some of the “poems” and find ways to improve the spacing that also improved the impact and message of the piece (For example, “We Fill Our Mason Jars” absolutely did not need to be in three blocky columns. That piece is about finding love, peace, and freedom in the dark, and its structure instead reinforces a rigid and choppy rhythm). Poetry, or verse, is about many things and its rules are almost always being broken by writers. Yet it's also about combining the abstract with the concrete, what are you trying to say and how are you trying to say it—and often, these sections didn’t reveal anything that hasn’t already been said about queerness and identity.

I will say this: this would be a joy to read for anybody who’s queer, for anybody who’s fallen in love with their presumably straight best friend, for anybody who dreams of meeting an older queer person and having them say that everything will be alright in the end. Lena, the elderly lesbian that Claire befriends, didn’t have many scenes and wasn’t developed beyond “kind queer older mentor”, but she was a delight to read. The happy ending also didn’t hurt.

Regretfully, Ode to My First Car really would have been better if written in prose. It gets a 2½ stars from me.