Young Writers Society

Hi Evi,

First of all, the title can be absorbed into the first line of the poem or vice versa. You don't need to repeat.

What did you do, pull out one of your short stories and take a hacksaw to it? This piece starts to do downhill fast, right after the "But I don't mind". At that point, the words themselves create an atmosphere that makes it seem to the reader as if he's being lectured to by a gossipy sorority girl. "but you forget", "Just look at her", "you don't get to decide", and so on. It works in prose, when you want your audience to feel comforted by the cadences of everyday life - including the style of speech. But poetry shouldn't clothe itself in such unnecessary synchronization unless that's directly relevant to the theme being expressed, and it sure isn't here.

Imagery is okay but when you go from moon craters in one line to ice cream in the next, and never come back to the ice cream imagery again... then we have a problem. I think I used to do this at some point too, so excuse the hypocrisy. Your images should all make sense, all be connected to either the main point of the poem or to at least each other. Saying that one makes holes like an ice-cream-scooper is just insulting to the intelligence of the reader if it doesn't mean anything beyond what it says.

Italics, really? You shouldn't need gimmicks to make your case. Again, this can fly in prose because you want to illustrate the nuances of speech, but in most poetry that ends up looking artificial.

In general, I think it's kind of cray-cray how you think you can stuff a poem full of filler and not expect it to taste sour. This thing has stayed in the sun for far too long; I suggest that you compost these words and start over.

In a nutshell: chop, chop, chop. Get rid of all the unnecessary frills and outliers that clearly point to this as being a wannabe story instead of a poem.

Hope that helped,
Galerius

Hello there!

I would just like to say that this poem is really interesting. In parts such as:

I’ve watched marble palms grasp at waves
and slip right through, inky sky melting into inky sea)

But I don’t mind—my subjects count the hours
in cups of coffee and secrets that they think I can’t hear,
in dimming candlelight and drooping eyelids, their insides laced with fireflies.

Hey, Evi.

Since you were kind enough to review my short story, I thought that I would drop by and give this a quick review. Overall, this is a really good piece. You're definitely gifted when it comes to poetry. Like me, though, I think prose is definitely your strength -- not to say that this isn't good! You're a lot better then I am, that's for sure. What I love the most about this is the imagery and the metaphors/similes that you use. For instance, lines like these:

she sprinkles yellow roses and breadcrumbs
on the sidewalk so the world can follow her—

and landed on me instead, scooping out craters of dust and darkness
as easily as scooping out ice-cream.