Heya Light,
Thanks for requesting a review! Like I said in my shop, poetry is definitely not a forte of mine, so please understand that this is your wheelhouse and I may trip and stumble from time to time.
That said, critique sandwich time.
1. What did I like about this piece?
> The premise is interesting, if not a little confusing. In fact, as I'm Australian, I didn't even get this poem at all until I read it a second time. In Australia the person who scans the goods at a grocery store is the same person who bags the goods. In fact, many shops now have their own check-out system, where you can scan, bag and pay for your goods at your own station. So as you can imagine, this poem did not relate to me at all. So I liked reading something new and broadening my perspective of the world.
2. What specific points need improvement?
> Unfortunately, I had to read the poem a 3rd time to realise the above stuff I wrote wasn't even correct in a way. I'm guessing he's just a check-out-chick at a book store? If so the snippets of instructions he hears is just strange. No "superior" says "wrong scanning" - it's so awfully vague. It just sounds like a terrible work environment.
> The main character sounds like a rude person who only cares about money and not the customers around him. When the voice is unlikable, the piece can easily become unlikable too.
> I didn't like the brackets as they interfered with the narrative instead of adding to it. What do you lose if you remove the brackets around most of the work? Pretty much nothing.
> I also disliked the overuse of exclamation marks. Are the comments really that exciting, moving, wondrous or horrific? Are they shocking, delicious or outrageous? Do they need the reinforcement of this punctuation that dictates they are an important, very important, part of the narrative?
> Overuse of words like "however", "again", "nonetheless". Each time you use them it's a bit like, "I'm not racist, but..." - ie, everything said before is forgotten.
> The use of "superior" instead of "boss". This might be an Aussie thing, but we rarely talk about higher-ups as "superiors". When I was a cashier, the older and more experienced colleagues were just colleagues. Only the manager was a manager/boss. As this guy works in a book store, he doesn't encounter "super boss magnates" like you would in a successful law firm or publishing company, so he shouldn't really be calling them "superior". Unless this was a sort of sarcastic title, in which case, it did not come off as sarcastic at all.
> Some bits and pieces I noticed throughout:
an irrelevant topic for some others much bigger in necessity.
To me, this doesn't make any sense at all. If you were being cryptic or vague about what is more important to others, it just came off as odd, not clever.
when her superior utters thunder to his ears
His?
3. What are my concluding thoughts?
> Overall, I did not really enjoy this poem. If your goal was to turn a beeping noise into something interesting, you tried valiantly, but it is a difficult topic to succeed with. I felt as if because the voice was not interesting and the topic was not interesting, the poem ended up as a multiplicative of not interesting.
I think you can reword and restructure your poem to include some figurative language that will liven up the pacing and imagery. Make it something alive with description and actual thought as opposed to the passive voice you've got going. See if you can use repetition, onomatopoeia (I'm surprised there is none for a poem about sound), metaphors, similes, anything to enrich this piece.
For example...
It is a tiny detail in his life, but a part of his life, nonetheless
(it is the one he hears every time he scans the item!).
still a part of his tiny existance
for the tiny beep is something he hears
for every tiny scan
is like the breath of a tiny new start
abruptly silenced
only to start again
^Not saying the above is a masterpiece, but I've deliberately used poetic devices to further a point.
Again, poetry is not something I write or read, so I do have a sort of romanticised view of it. Poetry to me has to cause me to feel something when I read. It needs to have some sort of meter involved for it to flow. It needs to be enlightening, I need to learn something valuable from it. I don't feel as if you've achieved the above things.
I hope my review helped in some way!
All the best,
Jai
Points: 22732
Reviews: 377
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