A Review of “Lines Worth Remembering: A BREW Poetry Award 2024 Collection” Edited by Esperanza Pretila

You could think of Lines Worth Remembering as a literary quilt—stitched together by dozens of hands, each patch its own story, its own shade, its own kind of weather. But to say that sells it short. This book isn’t a collection you sit down to read in order; it’s one you wander through like a forest, not knowing what will meet you around the next page: a revelation, a sharp memory, a frog mid-leap, or a storm raging quietly behind someone’s eyes.

What makes the anthology so compelling isn’t just the emotional content—which is vast—but the ways it resists uniformity. The voices don’t blur together; they jostle, they rub against each other, sometimes softly, sometimes with grit. You can feel the different contexts pressing into the words: some poems were clearly written in the stillness of long nights, others seem to have been scribbled down mid-commute, mid-cry, mid-laugh. That makes the reading experience less like literary appreciation and more like eavesdropping at the edge of something real.

There’s a kind of honesty that only comes when a poet forgets the reader is watching. Many of the works here feel that way—unfiltered, unpolished in the best sense, like thoughts caught in mid-bloom. And still, the collection doesn’t descend into a diary-like confessional. Instead, it rises into a shared language. The poems trust us. Not to agree, but to listen.

You don’t need to be a poetry expert to enter this world. The anthology welcomes hesitation, even discomfort. Its strength lies not in uniform brilliance but in its willingness to include fragility, awkwardness, hesitation. The standout poems do what good poetry should do: stop time, crack something open, and leave you changed by the silence that follows. Others simply accompany you like a low hum, and that too has value.

There's no central thesis here. No singular message shouted across the pages. But maybe that’s the message itself. That we live side by side with strangers, each carrying untold stories, each shaping their own version of meaning from the same sky, the same ache, the same stubborn hope.

This book won’t tell you how to live, but it might help you notice how you already are. Sometimes all it takes is one line.