Young Writers Society

Hi Seirre! Hope you’re doing fantabulously! Lim here with a short review.

First Impressions
The tone of the poem overall seems observational to me. It creates this sort of sympathetic and appreciative perspective of the human ‘reality’, perhaps contrary to a fiction that comes about via “trying to look too hard”.

the way this belly folds and piles.

This line embodies physicality and motion. The words “folds” and “piles” are so interesting, because ‘pile’ is kind of a magnification of ‘fold’ so it has this kind of crescendo effect that emphasises the movement. To me, it seems to hammer in the point about the addressee being alive and animate.

but it makes me think of how movies mimic the real thing
by carefully arranging hair so it looks windblown;
and how poetic is that. until you wash it all away,

for a bit, there is poetry in your hair.

I like this observation about fiction and reality. “how poetic is that” and “there is poetry in your hair” show an interesting reversal of how fiction imitates reality, and then reality (the person’s hair) is in turn compared to fiction (movie hair). Fiction and reality kind of feed into each other in a loop.

i wonder if i
shouldn't hate my voice, either,

if it's just a small clay bowl.

Love that image! These lines kind of make the voice seem like something innocent and faultless for having faults, if that makes sense. It creates a kind of pathos with something we don’t typically think we are capable of empathising with, like a voice or a bowl.

Imagery
The main group of imagery that stood out to me in this poem was the bodily imagery, such as “dead layer of skin”, “stomach”, “lips”, “frizzy and greasy” etc. Like another reviewer said it’s very human-focused, which brings out the speaker’s appreciation of these mundane everyday people-things. I knew from the title there was going to be something to do with “cracks” somewhere, and I did find myself waiting around for it not sure whether it was going to turn up until the second-to-last stanza.
These are just some neutral thoughts: I wonder if the “cracks” might apply for the images of lips in the third stanza as well, or even the “dead layer of skin” in the first one. At the moment, it seems like the poem goes through a whole gallery of different texture images, from “scraping/chapped/taut/peel” to “spills/folds/piles” and “bubbling/slumping”. In contrast, the final lines seem to focus on the “bowl/cracks”, which gives the impression that this image is the main point of the poem somehow.

Punctuation and Structure
The overall structure of the poem has a reflective feel. The parts where there are enjambments or line breaks kind of fragment the images, so that it feels like a sketch from memory, if that makes sense. For example:

i see that
way your stomach spills over the waist
of your jeans when you lay on your side,
the belly whispering that you breathe, you laugh,

The speaker first records that they “see” the addressee, and then the following three lines each focus on one image, which are all in the same location of the body, the abdomen. The structure helps guide the reader’s imagination so that we are seeing the ‘same’ thing as the speaker and so we can get a sense of their fond feelings towards this person more easily.

Voice
Something I like a lot about this poem is the voice given to both the speaker and the addressee. The addressee appears in the poem as being someone who is cheerful, who laughs a lot even though the speaker is “no comedic genius”. They are also imbued with a sense of the everyday, talking about “grocery store adventures”. Usually in poems like this the observation by the speaker tends to overshadow the presence of the addressee, but that’s not the case here, and I enjoy that quite a bit.

Overall
I thought this was an interesting piece. It definitely subverted my expectations, because I’d initially thought it was going to be a poem that was just focused on the speaker or perhaps a plural “we”. Instead, looking back at it now, it seems to be a story about a speaker making sense of this other person as well as themselves. I like the physicality of the imagery and think it makes the poem more immersive.

Hope some of this helps, and feel free to ask for more feedback!
-Lim