An ABC of Childhood Tragedy: Volume 1

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I also don't care -at least, not in regards to this book- about Peterson's ideology or questionable ideas about parenting. There are way better poets with way worse ideas. Here, I just want to talk about the quality of Peterson's writing. Let's consider one of the most anodyne poems in his book: Husbands, ask your wives: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.)

It promises to be as dark as grim fairy tales, but at least those had a story. Those had a message. This is so very obvious pandering. Let's put aside the fact that this poem is about an ugly child. Again, this could be the topic of a good work of literature. I'm more concerned about its utter meaninglesness. Is there a story here? Where is even the tragedy that was promised to us? Did anything happened to Katie or this is just Jordan Peterson being mean? On the formal level, notice the easy rhymes, clumsy structure, unimaginative word choice... Yes, this poem is just bad.Let's create a hypothetical scenario where you and your spouse are shopping for child-safe content. We're going with a male / female coupling because statistically speaking if you are on the LGBTQ+ spectrum or a single parent of any kind you will probably dismiss the book outright. This books comes off as a self-masturbatory writing, coming off as the authors political revenge fantasy of torturing the children of those ideologically different from him, that the only jokes are, “lol, aren’t the left abusing children?” And even for that joke, it falls incredibly flat and obscured by bad writing. This isn't necessarily what readers have come to expect from Jordan Peterson's work. His prior books include a deep (and admittedly fairly dry) academic text on mythology and belief structures and two works that fit within (even as they rise above) the self-help genre. This is something entirely different: a short collection of twenty-six brief poems, each of which is accompanied by an illustration by Juliette Fogra. These are quite literally stereotypical tropes as stories. Then justifying it as abuse towards children.

Most of the poems in this book are just like this one, but some of them are more uncomfortable, given the topics they deal with. I don't think they are funny, and I certainly think they aren't deep. In the promotional video for this book, Peterson says that his goal was to "investigate the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor". He makes equivalent claims about his other, more serious books. I believe it's some kind of defense mechanism: if you think the book is not good, then it means you didn't understand it, because you are not smart enough to find "the nexus between beauty and tragedy and humor". Each verse has a simple rhyme pattern and uses lots of alliteration. Many of the rhymes don't really work. Like he rhymes "own/groaned" "them/men". Some nice word choices with the alliterations to demonstrate a large vocabulary. More haunting still is the realization that, though of course the cases are fictionalized and rendered in poetic form, they're inspired by Peterson's decades of clinical work. The individual children depicted may never have existed (at least under the names they're given in the book), but at the very least they represent an amalgamation of the horrors Peterson has witnessed throughout his career, and that fact alone ought to justify a study of this book.

Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, self-help writer, cultural critic and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief, and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance. It’s promised as “poetry about the justice and darkness of humanity,” and it reads about as deep as Ben Shapiro’s novels. Wives, ask your husbands: What bothered you more, the terrible prose, the poor centering, the general sense of gesture without meaning, or the fact that the author is a bigot who talks like Kermit the Frog? (It’s OK, you can be honest.) However, while it's not structurally like anything else Peterson has written, followers of his work will recognize a common thread. Much (not all) of what he's written about involves the psychological toll of tragedy and trauma, particularly that inflicted during childhood. This book, while far from an academic treatise on the subject, provides a more visceral look at the topic, as each of the poems contain within their few lines a haunting revelation of the tragedies children all too often endure.