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Bella Thorne Speaks to Our Mogul Poet Hearts

Poetry Review: Life of a Wannabe Mogul Cover Bella Thorne
Reading Time: 2 minutes

In her debut poetry collection, actress and influencer Bella Thorne pulls no punches with her words and art.

Bella Thorne may very well be the rebel voice of her generation. Her new poetry collection, Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, tackles a litany of topics in a deep and searingly honest way.

Content & Themes

We aren’t going to pretend that Thorne’s poetry is lovely. It’s not languid, or fluffy, or delicate. That’s not her audience, though. One scroll through Thorne’s Instagram profile and you can clearly see she lives her life driven by creativity, authenticity, and unafraid of both the dark and the light.

The poetry in Life of a Wannabe Mogul reflects all the same depth and raw emotion fans have come to expect from Bella. But it’s tempered; Thorne infuses humor into her writing, both blunt and wry. And we expected those extremes from Thorne.

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What took us by surprise was how willing she was to rip her heart open and pull her readers into her unmitigated vulnerability. Reading her work is the same as experiencing the vivid, intense reality of life. We love the notes of empowerment woven through her pages. And we see and respect her baring her heart, too. She doesn’t just touch on themes of heartbreak, deception, depression, abuse, loneliness, abandonment.

Voice & Tone

It is hard to do justice to the dynamic nature of Thorne’s voice in these poems. They’re all at once earnest and unfiltered and heavy and dark. And then silly, humorous, clever, and wryly funny. She frames the hard, heavy poems in language that doesn’t shrink from the gravity of her themes. Squared shoulders and a lifted chin are the images her examinations of the human experience of life evoke– not a young girl broken by the hands she’s been dealt. And at the same time, you catch in her verses an unmistakable twinkle– like she’s about to, at any moment, let you in on the punchline of a really good joke.

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It’s all so intimate. It’s like Thorne has ripped from her diary some of the pages most of us poets would prefer to keep secret and bound them up for us to dive into. For a celebrity of her caliber to open up this way to fans and new readers is somewhat unprecedented. The collection leaves you with the lingering impression that Thorne wrote with an ardent desire for authenticity and honesty. As a reader, it really feels like that’s what she delivers in her art.

Overall

We obviously loved Life of a Wannabe Mogul. It took us by surprise, with its depth and heart and kind of gritty nature. We loved the use of a traditional typewriter interspersed with hand-drawn sketches, and even the fact that the grammar wasn’t edited to perfection. It felt real. It felt like something that Thorne made with her heart and her mind, something she poured herself into. Her fingerprints were left on it, and from a poetry perspective, it feels like a really bold choice. As readers, this work felt incredibly authentic to Thorne, and all she stands for as an artist and a woman.

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We recommend this collection to any friend who wants edgier poetry, with harder-hitting themes and powerful, strong language. We also recommend it to our poets with darker senses of humor, and to anyone who loves a solid, empowering, clever take on poetry. Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray is selling out fast, but you can order your copy here.

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