Young Writers Society

Heya, Audy! Casanova here to do a review!

The firs thing I didn't really like was the repetition of,"These boots I..." it felt a little played out and redundant, at least to me. One of these would have been enough, with the poem continuing where the last line stopped at. Anyway, onward.
The next thing I noticed were these lines-

who know their way back home across the Whitestone Bridge into Pelham
who dive their soles into puddles and graze slumped along the cobblestone

Audy!

Good grief, you have some lines in here! But, those aside, I'm not sure I like stylistically what you're doing. I'm still sussing out if it's just me, or if it's more that I'm not sure it works in general.

That said: there are a few things I absolutely love. "These are the boots I tie/..." to the next line, and then the line with "return me to my roots." Your last three lines, too, I like. I'm not sure I like the transition directly above, but I'm also not sure what else would work.

Ok, so I've thought a bit more, and I think I know what's nagging at me more than anything, and that's the fact that this is wordy (don't laugh, I know this review is getting wordy!)! You also know I tend to pare down a bit too much, so take that with a giant grain of salt. I like the parallelism you have going, but it's simply too much. The stanza that sticks out the most is the third, both visually and in terms of not-strictly-needed extensions of the sailing metaphor. It's also the stanza that's probably the most loosely tied to the others: it's also the only one where you don't overtly use the word "boots."

Everything else is more a matter of me wanting to trim things that I should probably leave alone: I would leave off in the second to last stanza after "forlorn," for example. The second half of the line sounds off rhythmically to my ear, and I'm not positive you need the extra words anyway.

Other than my style issues (and yeah, I'm pretty sure it's mostly me, here), I like what you're doing, and where you're going. I especially like the lines drawn between your final stanza and the first. I think you could focus a bit more in the second and (especially) third stanzas on sound, since you do hone in on that in the others to I think good effect.

Thanks for the read! <3

I found the boots to be a nice comparison with struggling with life. If that was the point you tried to get across, then good job. As for the girl, I think it could either be a past experience of a different person or a memory of the narrator. It was a bit unclear to me, but then again, that just might be me. I'm not always the best person when it comes to trying to interpret poetry.