Young Writers Society

This is Kaos here for a review!

You start off with the line "You're my sweet little phoenix" which I thought could have been saved for later in the poem, but you titled it that and honestly it wasn't your trump card here. The line didn't really have anything special to it, but it does make me ask, who is the sweet little phoenix? You never establish who the sweet little phoenix is, and if they're actually a sweet little phoenix or if that's just a metaphor used throughout the poem. Give us more so that we know for sure.

You're my sweet little phoenix

Crumbled to ashes

Taken in the wind's embrace

Laid to rest on my doorstep

These first four lines seem pretty typical for a poem describing a phoenix. There was nothing new to experience here or no new way of thinking of a phoenix. You can have stuff like this still in the poem, but if you added imagery that gave a new way of thinking it would be a lot stronger. We get it, phoenixes die and are reborn from their ashes, almost all of the readers know what a phoenix is, so you don't have to repeat the exact basics unless it has a function. That's like saying:

"Water is a thing that our bodies need
it helps keep you hydrated
and also helps the body function
thank you for your time."

Give us more than just that.

Sweet little phoenix,

Be reborn from the ashes

Consume the past

Accept it

But once you've grown

flourished

thrived

Clumping this all together. So the speaker keeps talking to the phoenix in the poem and it doesn't really appeal to me. One word lines feel lazy with the "flourished" and "thrived". Use more of your senses than just sight. Do you know what I would want to hear about or I think that I would do basing off a poem about phoenixes? How they're always reborn and never fully die so they always come back to ash and then the smell of ash and smoke always looming around them. I think of themes of self-destruction and maybe even telling the story of how a phoenix came to be because it was was a bird filled with self-loathing so it now turns to ash when it dies and then is reborn. Give a new perspective rather than recycling all the same things we've heard before.

Brush off the ashes from your glistening feathers

Shake them to the ground

Let go

And move on

My sweet little phoenix

The first line doesn't really make sense as phoenixes are born from ashes so I don't know how the leftovers could still be on them.

The flow of the poem was weak as the lines didn't really do well at delivering and didn't have any weight behind them because there was no sort of build up of the lines. The lines felt more individual in the way that they had a hard time connecting to each other and I suggest using fill in words or punctuation that would connect the lines together in a better manner.

I highly suggest taking out some of the words here and replacing them with stronger synonyms. This'll help with the power behind your lines but just because you have stronger words doesn't mean it automatically saves the poem. There isn't really much here and so it didn't really feel that there was any detail. Not much was described about the phoenix other than it turning to ash and being reborn. And you forgot that there was more to it than that. Phoenixes are birds, you could have done something with that. You could have done something with the actual cycle that the phoenix dies in. You could add in more about the phoenix when it /is/ alive. I'm trying to say here is that you have a pretty broad subject matter that you can do a lot with but in the poem it didn't really explore a lot of the stuff you could have done.

I hope I helped and have a great day!

Heya, Dracula! Casanova here for a review!

Anyway, I don't know if I've reviewed anything of yours so I'm here to give it a shot.

The first thing I noticed was this these lines-

Crumbled to ashes

Taken in the wind's embrace

Laid to rest on my doorstep

Now, one thing I know about ashes is that once the wind, or any kind of moving air really, hits them- they scatter. The imagery throughout most of this poem is on point- but this kind've had me like,"eeh." Once a phoenix burns- it rebuilds itself from those ashes in that spot. Moving the ashes in that manner would cause the ashes to scatter- not allowing the phoenix to be reborn so to speak. That would be perfect imagery for the death of the phoenix- but here it seems sort of... used as filler, I guess you could say.

The part of the doorstep gets me as well. This imagery isn't continued throughout the entire poem- just that one line. Why is the phoenix resting there? Why you? Why not somewhere else? Why does the phoenix need to burn itself in the first place?

A lot of questions this poem does raise which are not answer which would be amazing if they were. Try.. Writing a story with it, I guess? The narrator keeps telling the phoenix to rebuild and to raise from the ashes- but we have little in-sight as to what's going on with the phoenix. All we know is the phoenix burns itself and you want it to rebuild.

Although in spots, as I said, your imagery is there- it's all over the place. It switches and doesn't seem complete. It's like you wrote this with the meaning of telling someone to get over the past, to make yourself better over it- but didn't know exactly what to say or how to say it.

Anyway, I hope this helps.

Keep on doing what you're doing and keep on keeping on.

Sincerely- Matthew Casanova Aaron