Young Writers Society

This is Kaos here for a review!

I didn't really feel like this poem conveyed the emotion of being numb, first off. It used a lot of metaphors or imagery from places I've heard before, like a heart breaking into pieces, or something of that sort.

I don't see it as bad, but it would be more powerful if you continued on about that and added more detail to it rather than throwing lines around that don't connect to each other or don't follow each other up well. It kinda feels like you're throwing in a bunch of one liners and then continuing onto something else. It makes the poem stronger if you connect the lines with metaphors.

The flow of the poem itself is good, the line lengths don't have any problems. I think there could be more variation in punctuation and it would help if you did that. Overall, I thought this poem was kind of lackluster in what it was trying to get across, but for grammar errors, it was mostly fine.

Have a great day!

Hello Divergent Demigod!

I'm your friendly neighborhood reviewer, and I'm here to review this poem!

First off, I am just going to say that I don't know if this is a personal story or not, and I don't really think that matters when it comes to reviewing. I'm just going to be reviewing for content/affect/effect of the poem and making suggestions about how I think you could improve it!

Onto the review.

You do a really good job getting into the flow of language with the words you choose and how you're moulding them together. You've got a good flow of language with the syntactical statement, and restatement that I like in a poem. Now, that's not to say that every poem has to be like that, I just like how you work it in this poem and I think it works in this situation.

I do feel like this is a bit too broad spectrum. You're saying these things, but I feel like, maybe, they're not specific enough to be relatable. To be relatable, you need it to be something that someone else hasn't experienced so that they can relate to it from the outside feeling the familiarity of being inside. Instead, this poem uses such broad statements that it doesn't give us a specific set of circumstances that couldn't be us. I think the emotional effect on the reader is therefor, undercut. I actually wrote an article about emotion in poetry Editing for Emotion with a section on specificity, or being specific, which I'm going to go over briefly here. I just wanted you to have the link in case you want some more details. [I tend to write like a text book ><; ]

Basically, I think you need to make this experience more unique to you. Right now, this is a situation, an experience, that just about anyone could say. If we take a challenge like "imagine the speaker is a 10 year old from South America" and answer yes or no if this could be them speaking, we have to answer yes.

From this poem, we know that the reader has been hurt. We know that they've had the phrases "stupid" etc. used against them. That's all we know.

Now I'm not saying go super specific and start using names and "On the 12th of August you told me I was a fool and I believed you" sort of thing, but I am asking for something unique to the speaker, like maybe where/how they tried to cope at first. Did they have some secret/special place that no one else would go to? Did they try some sort of verbal retribution that would be unique to their situation? Make us feel like this couldn't be US saying this, but someone we can feel sympathy for, so that our empathic heartstrings are tugged.

Aside from that, I can't say I really care that you had a lot of end punctuation, or line capitalization in this poem. I don't think it is the best fit, but I sort of have a bias against those two choices, so I don't really think I'm qualified to suggest something for you. If you don't know what other choices are out there, you can check out these two articles Punctuation in Poetry Capitalization in Poetry and they'll tell you about it.

So, in summary, I love the way your words flow, I just wish they would have more specifics.

I hope this helps!
Aley