Hi there, MJ stopping by for a (pitiful attempt at a) poetry review! I'm a bit out of my element here, so I apologize in advance for my ramblings and if I confuse you more than I help you. I'll do my best to give you some other help.
Stutter doesn't seem like the most powerful word here. When I think of 'stuttering', I think of pausing and jostling a little bit, but not completely stopping. Maybe a more forceful verb like "jolt" would serve you better.as I stutter to an awkward stop.
This is more of an iffy point, but I would put commas in after 'foreign' and 'stiff' to notate a pause. I think that it would sound a little bit smoother if there was an emphatic pause there, but that might be personal preference.But my body
feels foreign
and stiff
and unyielding
"Poor girl- she's so clumsy" should have quotation marks around it like so. (see what I did there)murmurs of
poor girl -
she's so clumsy.
My biggest critique here would be that the beginning seems to have more of a metaphor about life, and it doesn't seem to be consistent with the theme of the poem. "When I rise, I fall" is pretty ambiguous, and dare I even say "cliche" because of how often it is used to describe somebody who tries hard at some sort of unmentioned task but cannot succeed.
The repetition of that line also kinda threw me, and unless you had a very specific purpose for that and it was a very stylistic thing that I just lack the capacity to understand, I would consider redoing that. I think it would be a nice touch if you were to make the first line more of a theme throughout, but it's also fine if you wanted to take that out so you follow the 4-line pattern.
Hopefully my review was helpful, and I apologize since most of what I said was probably just personal preference, but hopefully there were a few little tidbits in here that were helpful. Let me know if you need any clarifications, and I'd be happy to help!
Best wishes & happy Review Day,
MJ
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