Poetry Book Review
Title: Reveal Yourself: The Best Version of You Is Looking Right through Your Eyes
Author: Matthew Lawrence Scigousky
Publisher: Independent
Released: October 29, 2022
Pages: 119
ASIN: B0BKYNRJ78
Stars: 4.0
Reveal Yourself: The Best Version of You Is Looking Right through Your Eyes is motivational prose poetry (enjambment) from author, speaker, and motivator Matthew Lawrence Scigousky. The book’s themes encompass struggle, adversity, self-doubt, resilience, fortitude, strength, faith, hope, love, acceptance, and forgiveness. While I have never heard Scigousky speak, his prose is often beautiful and positive, much like affirmations. Still, I have read his messages many times before by a hundred other spiritual and motivational authors. Other than his delivering his messages through poetry, I could not see what makes this man unique and sets him apart from other motivational and inspirational writers because there’s nothing of his experience in this work.
So, I looked him up online and discovered that when he was six months old, he had both legs in a cast and was misdiagnosed with MS when a spinal tumor was the real issue. Matthew underwent multiple surgeries on his left leg and spine before he was ten and was left with a permanently deformed left leg. He became a competitive ski racer in middle school and learned to adapt and compete in wrestling in high school and track in college. He graduated from university and became a professional, award-winning sales rep in medical device sales. None of this information was in this book (or at least the Kindle version I read), and it should be. It allows the reader to understand how much Scigousky has overcome through his personal regime and positive outlook on life.
I am an editor, and a poet (whose work is very different) who found Scigousky’s use of enjambment, grammar errors, misspelled words, lack of apostrophes where needed, and missed words threw off the flow of his words so that I had to re-read many poems more than once. In addition, his overuse of the word imprint and awkward lines like this one in “Magnetize”: “Positive attractiveness’s magnetic scent is irresistible” and “Hemispherical belief finds orbit?” in “Shine,” made me think of him as a New Age science teacher. Perhaps different line spacing might have helped the rhythm of the verse, but an audiobook version of the book read by the author most certainly would. I think Scigousky must be a lovely, learned man, and I heard his words and beliefs through these poems but not his heart or experience.
I appreciated the author’s quotes between the poems. I enjoyed “Coordinated Direction,” “Unstoppable,” “Rapture of the Heart,” “Changing Hearts & Minds,” “All These Moments,” “Attract What You Feel,” “Discover what you don’t know,” “Latent Powers Within,” “Sometimes The Challenge Chooses You…” and “Substance of the Heart.”
Font styles, sizes, and italics change without rhyme or reason, as well as the poems’ title cases. The work would benefit from a professional edit. However, I highlighted many lines within the author’s prose to remind me of what I need or want to remember. I’m not sorry that I purchased this book because I was looking for something positive to read, and I found it.
While I hold myself accountable for almost everything in my life, I do not believe that everything in life is under our control, nor that most humans can assert their will and control the energy that affects our lives. It’s a massive universe. In fact, we have far less control than what Scigousky believes, no matter how we choose to look at the world. The one theme he missed here is surrender, as there is much in life we must surrender to in order to achieve the life we want and let go of the need to control so that we can be happy. However, Scigousky has written a book he can be proud of and that readers will undoubtedly benefit from.