Young Writers Society

hey <3 So you combine a lot of my favorite cliches here and I love them. Icarus has held my fascination since I first read "landscape of the fall of Icarus" years ago in some anthology, and I have a guilty & insatiable hunger for new presentations of that well-worn legend.

There are parts of this I love and the parts I don't are, as Penguin said, simply unclear. Little changes in wording could greatly improve your flow, for example I would change your introductory sentence to

i woke up this morning, hands shaking

Hey, remind me to review this!!

Review of this work is very well done with discription of her lost of a soulmate.
I give this a 5 star rating and it was really interesting. Their is always feelings of angry when separation happens in any relationship.
The famous artist comment was very appropriate and used to help explain the loneliness.

I was very impressed with the descriptive nature of this story.
The author was angry her mate left her and I could tell through the story that her feeling of helplessness was appearen't in this. I hope you enjoy this short story I really liked it.

This is so beautiful, LadySpark! I don't know how anyone has the capacity to write like this, but you put your skill to amazing use! Never stop.

I love it!! Keep writing!

Hey Princess,

So you've already been getting a lot of love on this in the form of comments and likes, which is super rad to see. I'm going to go a bit against that grain in my review but we've been poeting together for some time now so I think you'll get what I'm about.

I want to start with the fact that you have a really solid idea here. You're taking the traditional "poor me, all alone, ex-left me" story and turning it into something sinister and awkwardly abusive and emotional. It's not always easy to make a cliched concept into something people genuinely get excited about, in fact, it's almost impossible - but you're doing it here for a lot of people. I really like that you're bringing back the wolf thing - which I believe I remember from a couple other poems? It's good to have a solid theme, to be working through a concept that interests you, as this clearly does!

You're missing the mark with me, it's true. Part of this is through the form, I think. I don't particularly dislike the form you've chosen for this, I don't have any problems with your line breaks really or whatever. What I do have a problem with is the rhythm of your poem, in that it has very little, and what it does have is awkward. I've read your poem more than five times at the writing of this paragraph an each time I struggle to push myself to the end without skipping bits. I don't feel a natural sense of line to line that I've seen in some of your other poetry. A lot of that has to do with the declarative nature of this poem, you're not opening up opportunities to run smoothly from line to line. We stop and start and stop and start. Maybe you're doing that intentionally - but for me it really puts me off reading, because I can't sink into the words.

In terms of the words themselves, you have some really really splendid images in this. I adore "felt my skeleton click back into place" and "a bone gate to keep out the howling." (though I would take out the "a" in the second). I like that you subvert some expectations by having his hands scarred. And some of the other images but I think that a lot of this feels repetitive or just underwhelming. Like "i woke up this morning and my lips were blue and numb from the cold you left." is a really boring line. This isn't an image, it's description and for me it's really not working. You have a couple of these lines that say things but also say nothing at the same time. Why not "behind you the cold send me blue at the tips" or whatever? Play with your images the way you're playing with form, they need it too.

That's it! I've been thinking about it. We're too much in your narrator's head. It's that declarative thing. Stop telling us "I woke up" "I guess" I-I-I, let's move a bit away from that. It's really hard to care for your narrator authentically because they keep telling me everything. I feel manipulated, like it's an overly sensitive teenager who is desperate for attention and keeps trying to push me toward the feeling I don't actually feel. That seems like an odd comparison, but I think it fits the sense of construction I get from this poem. It feels like it may have been a labour to write, that you may have carefully scripted it. You need to rip that apart for me to really get into it.

I dig on your use of lowercase for this, it fits with the sense of worthlessness (?) or displacement that I think your narrator puts across. Capitals would feel clunky and weird when your narrator is giving all of themselves to the Other in the poem. The Other has the capitals, the narrator gives them all away, or perhaps they are taken.

The concept of this poem and some of your lines are very good, and they make me want to keep trying to develop an attachment to your poem. I'd love to see you alter this a bit and convince me that it belongs in my memory. As always, if you change it let me know, I'd love to see it.

- <3

Edit: I just re-read this a couple times and really all it needs is some pruning. Such as
"i've had to start sleeping with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the howling. the howling is so loud i haven't slept in three days. "
to "i sleep with my spine wrapped around me, a bone gate to keep out the howling - so loud i haven't slept in three days."
You're due for some clarity of image, I think. The images themselves aren't a problem at all.

This is a true masterpiece... Please keep writing!

This nearly made me cry.

That's beautiful poetry, right there. <3