Young Writers Society

Hiya! Thanks for requesting a review, I hope you are having a great day or night!
Since these are seven unique poems, I'm going to try and review them separately. First off would be your poem "Sadness"
Your use of figurative language here was great, and it seems to be a strong suit of yours, running through all your poetry. The line "Sobbing like a lost madman" was particularly potent. I did think line three and four of the first stanza felt a little disconnected from one another, though I'm not certain why.
Your next poem, "Fly Away" felt a little bit like a continuation of your previous poem. Though this is possibly unintentional, I liked how the first poem is about being 'trapped' while the second is titled 'Fly Away' They both also have similar themes of isolation, if for different reasons.
I found myself chuckling a bit at "I am Sending", it was very relatable, even if it later takes a darker turn. It does feel a little out of place among the other poems, but I do enjoy it on its own.
"Love and Die" and "I'm Sorry" are both very good. My favorite line between the two was

When love swung a knife

As I said earlier, you have a particular talent regarding figurative language. I can 'see' the things you're feeling, if that makes any sense? It makes for a very lively read.
"Another Queer Ballad" was fantastic, though I wouldn't have known it what exactly it was about without the title. It was also distinct from your prior poems, while also still feeling like a continuation. It's a brilliant conclusion to this small collection of poetry, and though each of them stands on their own, together, they make a beautiful short anthology.
All in all, this was a wonderful read. I haven't read poetry in a while, but now I think I've been missing out! Thank you so much for asking me to take a look at this, I had so much fun reading it Keep on writing and have a fantastic day!

Hi there Kelisot! I'm only going to focus on two of your poems today, as I figure it's better to give more in-depth feedback on a couple than very vague feedback on all of them!

First I want to quickly talk about the title - I find the phrase "I locked myself" to be super interesting. It's not saying "I locked myself in [to a room]", since it's missing the "in", so it seems as if the verb (locked) is being applied directly to the object (myself). To me, that makes it sound like an internal struggle as opposed to a struggle with the narrator's surroundings. Perhaps the narrator has "locked themself" in that they no longer know how to act like themself. Perhaps it's more that they feel mentally numb. Perhaps it's that they feel like certain emotions have become locked inside them and they don't know how to get them out, so they simply can't feel or express some of their emotions. It's hard to tell just from the title alone, obviously, but I do quite enjoy that the title made me think so much before I even started reading the poems!

Love and Die

I think this poem is about two lovers finally reuniting at the end of their lives. It sounds like they have a lot of history, but they've put that all aside because there are higher stakes now. I can't tell if the imminent death being referred to throughout the poem has to do with old age, dangerous circumstances, or potentially even a double su*c*de - but regardless, it seems that the narrator is expecting to die soon and is determined to be defiantly happy and alive in the meantime.

One of my favourite parts of this poem was the phenomenal sound devices you used throughout. "Laughing in afterlife" especially was just beautiful - I couldn't place why at first, but then I realized it's because of the repetition of the "aff" sound in laughing and afterlife. And I enjoyed the repetition of the "i" sound in the closing couplet: cry, I, ai, ai, I, cried, & dye. I imagine that hearing those two lines spoken aloud would be amazing.

In terms of a main critique, I found that a lot of the poem was just sentence fragments. It made the ideas feel disjointed from one another, and sometimes I genuinely couldn't parse what was going on or where one thought stopped and another started. For example:

We can leave when darkness
The shadows, my little bane

I expect darkness to be doing something in the second line; we can leave when darkness arrives, or something like that. Instead two new nouns (the shadows & little bane) are introduced, with no clear connection to the previous line (and no clear connection to the line after, either). This kind of thing happens several times throughout the poem. I think there's a good chance this is because you were trying to accommodate the rhyme scheme, and compromised clarity/good flow to do so. I would encourage you to remove the line breaks, and look at the poem like that to see if it actually makes sense, sounds natural, and forms complete sentences. Workshop that and then put it back into poem form!

I'm Sorry

I love a good limerick! It can be interesting to play around with darker subject matter in a limerick, since the form is so strongly associated with playful themes and comedy. It creates a big contrast when you take the playful form and use it to write a morbid poem!

Looking at structure, your lines are all very similar in length. Typically, lines 1, 2, and 5 are longer than lines three and four. Usually the longer ones are 7-10 syllables while the shorter ones are 5-7. Obviously you don't need to conform to that rule, but it is something that a lot of readers will expect when they go into reading a limerick; so just something to keep in mind! If you don't mind contradicting readers' expectations, it's perfectly fine to leave as is.

I'm sorry for what I did (7)
Burning you for a bid (6)
With SOS, you scream (6)
Your soul is still agleam (6)
And my mind is still a kid (7)

I like that you manage to pack the poem so full of images in such a short space. You use very evocative language: burning, scream, agleam. And that makes the whole thing feel vivid and engaging for sure. Also love the subtle alliteration of "burning" with "bid" in line two!

I feel like there could be a lot of backstory to this poem! It's hard to capture an entire conflict in just 5 lines, but you did a great job considering that. I think the poem's about something that happened while the narrator and the person being addressed were still kids. The narrator majorly betrayed the other person in some way - perhaps for a dare? or to gain popularity? - and now they regret it. The other person, though, is still facing the negative repercussions of whatever happened, which makes the reader question if they'll actually accept the narrator's apology or if the narrator is just kind of speaking into the void.

Overall - while I didn't review all your poems in this set, I did read them all, and I definitely see a thread of interpersonal conflict / relationship problems that kind of unites them all. Some are conflicts from the past, some from the present, some in person, and some online, which adds interesting variety and means that the theme is being looked at from a lot of different angles. I hope this review proves useful for me, and let me know if there was a poem you really wanted feedback on that I didn't get to; I can leave a comment on a specific poem if you'd like!

Best,
Seirre