Young Writers Society

Hi cow!

I am here for a quick review. Your poem had a lot of strong emotions coming out and I liked how you made two conflicting emotions. The one's aligned in the middle sort of revealed more about the inner suppressed feelings. I guess they added more power to your poem. I liked this idea of using the metaphor of brick with rope stuck at the bottom of a lake. I mean I always get that sort of negative feeling so I could relate with it.

The line where you mentioned about dressing made me realise of what the idea behind this could be. It can be really frustrating to be judged and follow the rules that others think is important. We are often expected to meet the expectations of the society and our parents that makes our own choices get buried deep within us.

You have already mentioned about your choice for italicizing and bolding certain words that you wanted to put emphasis on them. I really like your style.

Overall it was a very intriguing piece and had a lot of powerful emotions. I am very impressed with your poem.

Great work!
Keep writing

There's a lot of emotion behind this, Cow. It's powerful and moving.
Well done.

Cow,

there seems to be a lot of really heavy / intense emotions behind this poem. I'm sorry if real events inspired them, and I'm hoping writing this poem allowed you to process things a bit. Poetry definitely always helps me in doing that.

As for a review -

I think that the formatting did not help communicate the intensity, but instead the use of different alignments and the mixture of italics and bold felt a bit gimmicky. I half-expected all the bolded-words to spell out something, but couldn't really find a good reason for all of them to be emphasized. The thing with emphasis marks is it's like exclamation marks. One! will leave an impression. But ! if !! you!! start !! using them all! the time!! they stop having any meaning. Hopefully that makes sense.

I think it's good that the conflict turns towards specificity and you tell the reader pretty directly what the problem is - > a lot of mournful poems sort of dance around the problem and then it's hard as a reader to have empathy with the speaker. You state the problem as feeling despair because the speaker can't dress how they want - but you don't really link this to the very heavy themes of almost suicide / heavy depression in the last stanza. I think there needs to be a clearer transition of how not being able to wear something led to that heavy emotion. My thought is that perhaps the speaker wants to present their gender in one way, but they're being told to dress another way? I can't imagine why any other issue of dressing would cause so much upheaval. I think some of the details could definitely be filled in, because the end sounds a bit overly dramatic with out those missing links.

The metaphor of a brick is one I've read before, but definitely works to communicate what you're saying and I like that you used that image both at the beginning and end as this added some continuity to the piece.

Hope this gave you some pieces to think on! Best of luck in all of your poetry writing, and I do hope you are feeling better!

- alliyah

Greetings fellow writer, I'm Thorn, and I'll be reviewing for you today.

Overall meaning is executed greatly with the metaphors, but I believe that your formatting choices take away from everything as your eyes go from here to there, it's extremely confusing with how it's all set up. I can read through the feelings that are voiced, yet it doesn't feel as strong because of the childish layout. It's not exactly childish, but in a way it's not totally adult like with everything.

---->"Without feeling like I'm just a brick with rope"

->That is some good description. It's more meaningful than the other stanzas because of the language and the voice. It's more relatable, and it's written differently because of the metaphor used, which is powerful, but I also feel like it's strangely worded.

---->Some words are italicized, which is awfully confusing. I don't think it's necessarily needed because it's written fine without the choice of drawing attention. It's similar to the layout, not that bad, but still awkward.

->Some examples are "truly" and "see" along with others. I don't believe that it is needed, but your choice.

Ask about anything weird.

Catch you later.

@LittleLee @Gravitem

Another vent, so yay, I guess.