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Brilliant! Brilliant!Brilliant!Brilliant!Brilliant!Brilliant!

Hiya!! Ashkitten here for a review. I just want to say I loved it. I felt so taken by the whole concept. It took my mind so many places, and my mind took my heart along on the journey through your words. I love the format, the description, the imagery. It was all perfect. Everything worked for this piece, and I really enjoyed reading it. I would normally say it lacked capitalization but I think that also worked for it, not against it. I look forward to reading more of your writing.

Wow... this is insanely insane. I'm like literally tying to find something bad but I can't! This poem really made me stop and think.

What if I was someone else...???

I Enjoyed this so so so sooooooo much! Keep writing

~Elephant

Darling. <3

This will probably be more brief than you want it to be, but my points are very specific and haven't been covered yet. So if you remember anything about my checklist of poetry, you basically have:

[] Flow
[] Connectivity
[] Fluidity of Transitions
[] Potency of Sentiment

You have flow - with a few exceptions where your line breaks argue with the rhythm of natural breathing. This is an easy case of tender love & care that needs to be given a bit more. Now. I want to talk a lot about Connectivity. Your primary image is the lake, and the primary sentiment is "you are not yourself". Under normal circumstances, I think this would be okay, but your main image keeps changing. The lake is the lake, then it's the grave, then it's the lake, then the lake is a temple, then you dump it to talk about organs - you can understand why the reader would get lost.

Upon my first to third read of this (I'm at eight now and still don't know what impacted me), it left me with a feeling of being changed, but my head wasn't sure what changed. So you have a case of empty evocation. Your words are pretty and smooth but don't accomplish what is desired because there is so much going on by the end that you tie yourself into an impossible knot.

Personally, I think the first thing to go is the organ talk in part iii. It's a nice thought that sometimes you can miss something without knowing it's gone, and I get that - but it just does a NUMBER on your underlying themes and meanings and ultimate lesson. It just puts me in a bind, and when I get in a bind, I say cut it.

Anyway, the strongest point of this poem is part ii. You have clear thoughts and sentiment and it works on its own as a conducive poem...until you go back to the lake. Even the last line works as a non-sequitur. But the lake completely pulls the reader out of the moment and slaps them with a reminder that "you're reading MY poem so don't get caught up in YOUR thoughts."

If I were to highlight a line of this in a book, it would be you're not obliged to suck the marrow from your own mistakes.

Think on this. Figure out what you want the reader to take away. Then chop it apart.

Ty

Wow, this is lovely.

You do have a typo in your third section, first stanza, second line. You use "your" when it should be "you're."

Happy YWSing!

Oh my gods.... Your poem is so beautiful. The detail to paint a scene is ones head is intense. I actually felt like i was at the lake or at Christmas dinner. Just with the concept of not being yourself was enough to make me stop and think "wow... This is going to be good."

Wow. Such a dark piece. I need to tell you something. That line. That one line. "whose drowning". Despite it being spelled incorrectly, this line shook me. My eyes widened. It was at this moment that the work impacted me. You have done brilliantly on this. I have a feeling that you write from personal experience, as nothing can be so passionate and precise from one without the one who made it having experienced it before.

This is brilliant. I'd like to mention I know nothing about poems in a structure sense or a critical sense, I simply read the words and see if they reach out to me. Boy did this one do the trick. I relate to the very first (stanza?) quite well. See, I go and visit some family in Addison every once or twice a year and they have their own little private beach. That scene perfectly described what a moment by the sea for me feels like. Especially "-consider the way your toes curl against the sand; the way your skin tingles when the wind catches it". I can see that moment so vividly and clear, just wonderful really. Also the bit about the lake I quite like due to something I'm working on at the moment. Seriously, splendid poem here. It really spoke to me!