blackout

Hi there!

I agree with what's been said already. You've got some great images glimpsed through a fog of abstraction. I particularly like "we stare into the bridges of our hands to the spot where our thumbs rest in their crooks" -- fantastic description. There are some other great, concrete images (coconut twist, shingles) but I want to linger longer on each one. How about the splintery feel of the wet shingles on bare feet? I love the words "raw wishes" but I don't know what they look like. I would let each image breathe, gain form, before it spins back out into the cloud.

I like the form or lack thereof; it works for the feeling I think you're trying to convey. As an exercise, though, it might help to try writing it in complete sentences, following each thought to its end, and then when you've figured out where they're going put it back in the form it's in now. I dunno, just an idea.

The whole thing sort of floats nebulously, trying on different meanings for size, and needs to be harnessed into something coherent. "Pain has a destination" is a good line, but I as reader need you to bring me there. The jar of sighs as paper weight, the planted streetlamps... beautiful stuff. Don't water it down with this "erase the years of distance separating our hearts" and "you broke into the chest of my heart and stole its key" business. I would also suggest tightening it up; I bet this would read more powerfully if you shortened it to half its length.

Hope that helps! Thanks for a good read!

-BFG

Hellooooo~

You have a lot of reviews on this already, but why not one more?

This poem is V shaped. Not physically, but in ideology. You start with something that seems really broad and vague (and I kind of wish was more focused) and it tapers to a point at the bottom that we can understand. Pain has a destination, too, and we're always looking for where it went. It's the point of the dagger that we really understand (whoops, this is a review, not a poem. Calm down, Morri).

I like that it's a lot of images, but you throw in images whenever you want and wherever. It's almost confusing. So try to stick with fewer images that fit in more seamlessly or relate more to one another.

I especially like the streetlight planting image. That one was nice.

Sorry this probably wasn't much help. But I like it and want more clarity. So basically what everyone else said >.<

Happy poeting!

Hey,

Just a remark- I wish you had continued the toffee theme throughout the poem and used it for more than just the start of the poem. I don't know why, I just kind of expect it to continue when you mention 'wrappers', 'sweetness', 'savoring' and 'coconut twists'. It got me interested in the beginning, but the poem unraveled into a different theme. But as I said earlier, this is just a remark.

I have somewhat similar feelings as Lumi below, about some of the lines being too long.

The positive aspect of this piece of work is it that you're style of writing is rich in terms of imagery, I just feel like you scatter it around in all directions instead of directing it in the form of a flow of images and expressions, which, as Pompadour remarked, needs to be linked in some way so that the reader can understand your thought process. While you, reading this poem, may connect those pieces, it can sometimes be hard for the reader to do the same. So if you're writing this poem just for your own sake, then it is okay, but if you want to speak to your readers then you'll have to be a little less cryptic for them to understand what's going on.

I hope this could help.

Love,
Au.

Super short review because I'm not too familiar with your style and voice.

First and foremost, you have far too many sentences in your stanzagraphs that breathe on for way too long to be considered good flow. After a certain point, you need to figure out where your reader needs to breathe--even mentally--and correct the flow at that point. It's also useful for maintaining concision in your poetry as a style like this is easy to lose control over as far as keeping things condensed. I understand the prosaic narrative voice--and you know I use it--but you have to respect the nature of poetry at the same time, and respect the breath of the reader.

Some of your images feel unnecessary, and some of your descriptions also feel unnecessary. There's awkward phrasing a la "the waves acquired the quality of space".

Best line of the entire piece is pain has a destination too. So you accomplished the goal of giving me something to hold onto after reading the piece.

It needs a lot of work and possibly a lot of study, but you have promise here, and I think you can do a lot with it.

Ty xo

So my brother bought a set of dominoes the other day and my deprived childhood watched, completely unabashed, when I spent all day 'playing' with them. It's actually quite fascinating when you watch a line of dominoes toppling into each other; it's especially neat when they fall in straight lines.

The images you've got here, in this poem, reminded me of dominoes in that they topple over one another, but in essence, they're more like waves. Everything washes over the reader, and sometimes the dominoes feel like bits of clay--their shape is not very distinguishable. I adore how the toffee-related imagery is somewhat consistent, and some of the images you have here are pure /gold/. The problem is that they all stand somewhat-individually, with little connecting them to the rest of the line-up. It becomes hard to tell what the poet means to convey. The lack of punctuation implies that the narrator is endeavouring to create a stream-of-consciousness effect, but it's not so stream-of-consciousness as all the images running into one another and falling flat as the reader tried to understand what's going on. With stream-of-consciousness, it becomes easier for the poem to lay an impact if the imagery has very clear connections.

Bridges --> maps --> atlases --> travel --> camels might be an example of how this rolls, with interconnected images. Wrappers --> toffees --> city-imagery/streetlights/statues --> bridges, on the other hand, is hard to wrap your mind around. I'm not saying the images have to be the same, but there is diversity in similarity, too. A ripple moves to the edge of a pond in one direction, creating new occurrences as it goes; it does not leap to the edge, with an expanse of clear water in between. Don't be cryptic. Sort through the images you want to keep, the ones that link hands with each other, and store the rest of those beauties away for a rainy day.

Beautiful stuff, Sub. You ought to post your poetry more often.

Keep writing!

~Pomp x

Hiraeth!! Wow, this was completely packed FULL of emotion and pain and bitter unforgiving. There were few errors, and many great lines that should be in the book of great lines.

"youtell" should probably be "you tell" and "andyou" should probably be "and you". Just some minor errors, but errors nonetheless! Luckily, these little things didn't hinder the message-conveying at all. They were so small that they were virtually unnoticeable. Those were the only things I saw that needed critiquing, because the deeper stuff like flow and readability were totally covered in this piece.

I really loved the way you formatted it, half on the left margin, half on the right. It portrayed a sense of conflicting feelings, like maybe, one half of you was mad at the guy for leaving, one was sad that it didn't work out. There was so many hidden, betepween-the-line things in the last stanza. It showed more of a blend between the two feelings. The whole poem was kind of bitterly sorry, or passively impatient waiting for an apology that might never come.

This was very well written, and I would leave it exactly as is, except for the spacing errors. I also love the title,, because you didn't mention "blackout" at all in the poem itself, so it made the readers half to think for a little bit before they understood the meaning of the title. Well done with that.

Awesome work, Hiraeth. Keep it up!

~Caterpickle

Remind me to review this later.