Young Writers Society

Sizzle. ♥

This is going to be tiny and quick but I want you to bear with me because for once I disagree with some of Rosey's points, and it has to do with the structure of named stanzagraphs.

While you have your usual suspects of flow correction: the elimination of redundancies and the smoothing out of phraseology, i.e. bad, bad, bad words / salt choked me to death; I'd like to focus on the order of your stanzagraphs and the impact that their order has on the reader experience.

I agree that the title drop in round one is probably your biggest hitch; that said, I would have it transplanted into no other context, and thus the remedy is moving part one elsewhere. Personally, I would put three in the front and nix "before you left" and then have:

you told me i consumed you. yousaid i was immortal, that my soul hung onto your body with both hands. when you tore away, pieces of your skin were trapped beneath my nails.

Let's dance, sugar.

So I'm honestly not sure where to start. This is one of those poems that sounds like a good poem but as soon as you scratch a little bit at the surface, there's this lack of consistency, flow, and story that leaves lines of dirt under your nails when you go to play with the imagery.

The thing I liked: the first stanza up to the title drop. It has some interesting imagery that I very rarely hear and just sets up this dark beauty. I love the idea other people tell us love ruins, that love is the thing we will end with.

Onto the actual critique.

Once you drop the title in there the imagery is too obviously abusive, too obviously about toxicity, just too obvious. It's also a total disconnect from the rest of the poem, where up until that point you could pretend it was a tale of two people who were watching, a cautionary tale to the maniac pixie dream girl. That title drop causes an abrupt switch, cards going from in your hand to on the table in a five stanza fan where you reveal the end before it's even thought about.

Second stanza you introduce ocean imagery. I have no idea how much you use water imagery, or how much I see water imagery in toxic love poems (I'm prone to using it myself? So I could be biased here), but it just sets up this dependence, and you keep bringing the ending card out before we've even seen this only has five stanzas.

The second stanza also goes directly against everything you'd established before: black, white, and stars. There was no water, there was no coldness, there was only fire and passion and a fuse waiting to blow. Now you douse it, both literally and figuratively, adding in extra imagery and starting from scratch in terms of what you use to describe a relationship.

Third stanza. Back to consumption, to fire and passion and violence. These are good but could be better, could be so much more and right now all they do is give me whiplash because how can fire consume water? Then you get away from the fire and go to immortality, to something very physical when nothing has been an actual solid thing. This stanza feels human, feels too tied to bodies and blood and earth when you're discussing water bearing gods and stardust.

Also, "left" implies willing, and "tore away" is back to violence, into a possessive lover and one who said he'd never leave going away, a free spirit holding on and going completely against character, against the images of the first stanza and simply confusing me. Did the person leave without a fight, or did they have to break away? Who is the honest possessive one, here, because in stanza one they was it and in the third, the narrator is. If this is meant to show how abuse changes you, your second stanza was too weak as a transition and your third too detached from the first. They're the same imagery but different poems, different stories.

The repetition here just made me roll my eyes, because you've never used it before and this stanza is even more physical than the last. Before you had some illusion of surrealism, with an immortal and souls and hands that can't grip somehow holding on. Now it's physical, purely physical, and this is the single most detached stanza out of the lot.

It's also the bluntest, the one that strips away all beauty and all honest nuance for the sake of a physical reaction so out of place in what had been a dreamscape. It gives nothing that stanza five doesn't already say, and it just shows destruction without a scrap of anything fantastical, of anything haunting. The poem before had been a ghost, running fingers down spines and whispering in ears, causing hairs to stand up on end and goosebumps down to toes. But this is a baseball bat— knocking us senseless in one fell swoop.

Five. Back to surrealism, back to water, and back to something I swear I have heard you say before. Choking on salt and ending six feet under are common, and once again my own bias is there, but it's just easy to say "I was drowning in love and it killed me". You started off with something, with black and white worlds and stars that sounded like they came from Van Gogh, but you end with this shortness. Short stanza, short imagery, short words that deliver short emotions. There's nothing poetic about that, nothing original. I heard "she was drowning in love" in writing analysis when I was 13, in a book not even trying to be poetic. You can do better than that.

You start off with something. You honestly do start off with something. Then the poem just goes straight into typical images and typical humanity and everything is typical. You promise me magic and deliver rock salt. Where is my painting?

Gut this and start over. I know you can.

~Rosey

Howdy, Spark. ^^ I'm always a bit reluctant when it comes to critiquing your poetry because it's just so darn lovely and I'm awful at reviewing poetry anyway. I guess I'll give this a shot.

So bear with me.

Alrighty, so for me this poem didn't really flow as well as your other pieces do--or at least, it seemed rather halting in the beginning. I liked how you meshed stars and explosions together (it was very visual) and then built onto the metaphor. What I didn't like was the vagueness with which you started off. Yeah, sure, we can kind of guess who you meant by 'they', and poetry isn't about flinging concrete facts at your readers' faces. So I won't ask you to do that. I will, however, suggest you try to make the 'they'-whoever-they-are stand out more clearly. I also got a little confuddled since you initially began with a 'they' before switching to second-person (you), and that got me wondering if you were talking about different people. Since we never come back to 'they', though, I'm guessing it was just eh minor slip-up or something--or just me being too obtuse.

While the images in the first part/stanza were pretty, the flow was jarred by the 'and's. I'm a sucker for run-ons in poetry, but monotony I am not. Cut out one of the 'and's here, maybe?

And then they said, their lips cracked and bloody pressed to my neck, 'and you will always come back, wanting more.'

Wow. This is such a dark story, that gives me just creeps. I like how it begins lighter and then escalates to a darker place. My favorite part was the end "i went swimming in your oceans, and didn't notice that i was drowning until it was too late, and the salt choked me to death." they way you put it down really is grate. It's starts sudden and reads easy and then dead. This is a grate story, which gave me creeps but that's good, cos these stories needs to give creeps.