Young Writers Society

Wow, Kayla, I am really impressed by the way this poem shifts from seeming to be about a romantic relationship to revealing a focus more on consideration of religion. It really surprised me to read to the end, then go back and check the beginning and see that the maple kisses and that tongue were not just for loving, but for talking and scolding and debating existence, I guess.

I also like the quiet way the topic is broached, because it's usually quite an explosive topic and can lead to a lot of raw emotions, anger, judgment, etc. Instead, you choose to relate it heavily to family and to words growing up, and to quiet moments of reflection after death.

If I could give suggestions, it would be to pay close attention to keeping subjects within your sentences consistent, or to somehow make it clear that these choices are deliberate and not typos. For example:

i hear you say from the other room,
and i take no effort to deny or veto his bitter words.

This shift from YOU to HIS feels to me like an oversight rather than a conscious choice. Similarly, the subject of sentences shifts around a lot in the first stanza -- that's where I would take the closest look. There, it's more a case of making sure the sentences make sense grammatically?

Like this section:

disregard
for the utterances you shot back at me, i dodged them
knowing they were the truth.

You start with a noun, and then a comma, and then an independent clause. It would make sense and we expect "disregarding", which is a gerund that would introduce a dependent clause and thus make the comma make sense, but a noun clause at the front of that sentence just doesn't feel right. Again, it comes off as an oversight, so if it was intentional, think of ways to make that clearer.

I hope these thoughts were helpful for you, Knight Kayla! You've done an amazing job (I mean, you always have, I just wasn't really here to watch it recently) this review day, so I salute you! <3

Thanks for sharing,

Hannah

Nikayla,

I like the last stanza.

You're working in the ethereal with some of this and it feels a little touch and go, like you're not quite making concrete sense all of the time. Ex:

the charades we play become candor to us over time,
a masquerade veiling the ideas that have been pushed
to the backs of our heads, an afterthought or footnote
that is never bothered to be perused in any way.

Here you're talking about a game, but you never say what the game represents. It's a common thing in your recent poetry not to really get into explaining yourself and while that's okay, I feel like you need to bring things back towards earth quicker once in a while. For instance, if you revised the stanza before that, made that one more concrete, then we might be able to assume that the charades is referencing this song and dance the characters have for sure. I mean, right now I can just assume that the two of them are acting out a friendship, but charades is a game about showing something with body language, so chances are they're showing their hatred for one another while actually speaking kindly, which doesn't work with the charades paragraph. You're saying that the charades is a masquerade but that's, not how that works. Charades is about clarity of motion, conveying a message, and masquerades are about representations of the self with a mask, if not belying who you are, and taunting people to guess who you really are beneath said mask.

And then we jump.

We jump from this idea of enemies acting as friends to religion? I think the transition of "What you don't know can't hurt you" or "ignorance is bliss" is a little weak because what you original get from it as a reader is that statements like "ignorance is bliss" are things that you can just believe, and hold so strongly in esteem that you reject other statements. Instead, when we get to heretical we realize it's more of a religious inclination, and that twist of the stanza creates a much stronger meaning, a much more dramatic meaning. You then go through talking about THAT, just to get to the next idea, the next stanza.

This second to last stanza gets so far away from the first stanza, the frenemies, that I really don't know where to start. I mean, poems can wander, sure, but usually they wind back up at the beginning and this one doesn't seem to do that. I don't know if it's just because it's a NaPo poem or because your poetry has gone in this direction, but it feels a little shallow because of it. It feels like the idea of the poem wasn't thought out at the beginning as we have no real indication that we're going to end up talking about mortality when we're talking about the fallacy of their relationship at the beginning. It's almost like the quintessential "Every poem is about death" poem.

So, all in all, I looove how you wrap back up in the bullet proof stuff, but I don't really like the way the middle twists about and gets away from that main point.

Aley