Young Writers Society

Hi Evi,

I should say in the beginning that even though this is obviously a personal poem, I will not soften my review. Just wanted to throw that out there because I've had experience in the writers of personal pieces lashing out and being immaturely protective of said piece, although I'm sure this won't be the case with you...)

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You make that quilt/metaphor way too obvious - second grade style obvious. Unraveling at the edges, loose ends, fraying fabric, tattered memories, woven, quilt, even seam, save with a stitch, transparent cloth, mismatched patterns. Did you count that? You are putting in a gross excess of effort into defining your literary terms and the guts of this poetic device are so stuffed into the body that they're cracking at the skin. Your reader isn't stupid. We realize what the quilt can represent, etc. We don't need ten different snapshots of the same idea to understand the full picture. Trim down this bloated stanza; getting rid of the pretentious "material of her perceptions", which fails to have any imagery at all as opposed to the rest of your stanza which has too much imagery, is a good way to start. Then, alter the rest.

Now that I think about it, it would be best to scrap this beginning completely and start over from scratch. Right now, it's crumbling under the weight of its own heavy-handedness. "Look at me, I'm a metaphor!" This needs to be toned down, patted into the self-proclaimed fabric so that it only shows through the individual strings and doesn't burst out of one's stomach like an uncooked meal.

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I am also guilty of doing this, but putting in that phrase in parentheses just makes it seem like you're creating an artificial secret... just for the purpose of revealing it. Very juvenile. It's hard to utilize parentheses in poems and you haven't done it in a way that resonates with the reader. Take them out. Actually, delete that whole line. If her smiles are "manufactured" and come out of "assembly lines", it's basically implied that they're disposable and worthless. You don't need to remind the reader.

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This is getting better. At first I believed that it described her descent into death (because of the transition into funeral flowers) but that didn't fit with the last three lines of the above section. Is this not following any kind of linear format? Clarify in the piece.

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This is done well except for the ending. There has to be some way you can describe dripping without saying "drip, drip, drip". Keep your standards high. Literal sounds sometimes work but not in cases like this.

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Barring the fact that "muddy bubblegum" was an odd choice of imagery because I'm pretty sure that nobody knows how muddy bubblegum tastes, this part of the poem is by far your strongest. It's personal without being sappy, powerful without being overblown. This is the template that you should use to craft the other pieces of your poem, in varying degrees.

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I was going to talk about how this was one fiery fail of an ending until the very end - that is, the last three words. They actually do tie in to the earlier themes of the poem. Unfortunately, they're not quite enough to bring back the utterly Disney-channel ending that you seem to have shoddily thrown together as a "fitting ending". Laughing, singing, soaring to the heavens? I admit that the contrast of comets with souls ascending to the outer planes is one that does mark a profound image, but don't end it with such a... simplistic and vapid tone. Again, the last three words brought the poem back to full force, but in a poem like this, you don't want your reader's expectations to droop right before they pick up again. The transitions in emotion need to be smooth. Revise the second-to-last line of the poem, it's killing the whole piece. If nothing else, make it subtler.

Other than that, this was an improvement over your other works and I want to see it hammered and polished. It's worth it.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

The parts in captions... well dont eliminate them but just leave them be IN the regular flow of the poem.

Thats really all I can pose.

Uhmm, I liked all the comparisons, for one, the examples of normality for this person and the one they were observing throughout the work.

The slowly degenerating state of the character's perception of the relative in question was morbidly pretty.

From simple memories and hints at something not well to outright fantasized displays of hospital rooms and tubes and hook ups and chemicals, it all was painted with a kind of starry brush that kept everything sort of 'smiling'

Like if someone is remembering something of no real importance or recounting a sad memory, all with a smile because of the fact that it stuck with them.

The end descritpion of the release and I guess safety and comfort of death was really what hit me.

I'd like to think I'd remember everything when I pass....

anyways, sorry, uhmm, long story short, loved it, I suck at grammar so I'll leave that to someone else and I ... well yeah I loved it.

o.O

So, I'm not a poetry person. At all. Thus, what I say may be useless and or not relevant, ha. But I wanted to return the favour, so I'll just mention the very few things that popped out to me, in what is (in my humble, inexperienced poetic opinion) a great piece.

The first line, with the weirdly formatted o-ur, is that intentional or is it just showing up oddly on this computer? It looks strange and serves no purpose.


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I would nix the second and third 'or's and leave it with the rhythmic repetition of 'the'.

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Aye aiie aiie! It was so good up until this point. And then you used the dreaded 'hospital' word. That word, in poetry, is death. In my opinion (ironically enough) anyway. It is laden with so much cliche as to turn me off the poem in its entirety. There is almost no way to be original with it. Destroy it! Also -- find me a hospital with empty rooms and I'll find you criminal negligence. Hospitals are stuffed to the brim - if only we had the luxury of empty rooms! People never seem to realise that. Use that instead if you *must* continue with the notion of rooms and emptiness in that obvious fashion.

Other than that, I would say un-italicise 'drip, drip, drip' - it comes off as a tad forced/contrived, as such. Leave it plain. I really enjoyed this piece, Evi. I enjoyed it more when it was just about the metaphor of cloth and weaving and assembly lines, before the whole hospital shenanigans came into play -- but still. Great stuff.