Some good things must come to an end, for new things to begin. Poet Alicia Cook explores this grievous emotion in her latest and final mixtape collection, The Music Was Just Getting Good. Alicia Cook is back with the highly anticipated final tracklist in her poetry collection of mixtapes, The Music Was Just Getting Good. Following in the footsteps of her first two installments, Stuff I’ve Been Feeling Lately (2016) and Sorry I Haven’t Texted You Back (2020), Cook is closing out her trilogy with a poignant and all too relatable look at the ebbs and flows of life. And why, even during our most difficult seasons, a better day can appear just around the corner. Spread across 184 tracks (92 poems and 92 blackout poems), each paired with an accompanying song, Cook returns to her evergreen themes of mental health, hope, and recovery, and reminds readers that grief is not reserved solely for death. We may grieve who we used to be, moments that never came to pass, physical places, and, of course, people; people who’ve died, but also those who left, and those we had to leave behind. A stunning closing number in a timely and necessary collection of work, The Music Was Just Getting Good is the balm your soul has been waiting for.