Young Writers Society

At the top where you would change it if it were offensive, don't. There are too many sensitive turds out there. This is lovely. It is powerful. You opened the eyes of a cruel, dark society. Keep writing.

Okay, so I just want to add one thing to @Nikayla's review. This bit that she mentioned.

If this wasn't the teacher telling you to list these three different things over and over, I think I'd suggest for you to take it out. It's really hit or miss; sometimes it works well such as in the second stanza where you list off names of fashion stores and it rolls nicely off the tongue, but stanza fifteen, the one with "She will live" is something that isn't as strong.

Prada, Gucci, Alex & Ani.

She, will, live.

Then money began to thin like her father’s balding hairline.

So spoonfuls became oceans and bites became mountains.

The night was quiet while her life slipped away.

This is Nikayla here for a review!

Jumping right into it with a review as promised, it didn't seem that your teacher gave you any set structure to work with so I'm going to jump right into that. Due to the repetition that runs throughout the poem I think adding something structure-wise and perhaps having each stanza be four lines long would add more consistency with the repetition as you use four-lined stanzas often in this poem but at the same time it's really your choice on how to form the structure as I can definitely see the format getting old for a longer poem. The reason I thought that your teacher assigned some form of structure because it seems the second line of each stanza is a list of some sort and then the last line of stanza is repetition, but I'm sure you could have done this on your own as well.

If this wasn't the teacher telling you to list these three different things over and over, I think I'd suggest for you to take it out. It's really hit or miss; sometimes it works well such as in the second stanza where you list off names of fashion stores and it rolls nicely off the tongue, but stanza fifteen, the one with "She will live" is something that isn't as strong.

The structure gets a little repetitive and stale but you do your best to mix that up with the listing like "Wrong, wrong, wrong." where it's all the same word but is repeated three times to have a stronger effect on the audience. Something that I wanted to tackle is that this is almost a narrative poem where it tells a story, or it is.

That was something that pulled me in about the poem since it follows the speaker who seems to at first be one of the "popular kids", and that was the first thing I wanted to tackle about this. I've never really liked the cliche of the "popular kids", but rather the speaker could be a more popular person who is vulnerable to what others say, and that's something that I can see happening more often, but that's concealed in other things.

I also wondered how old in age the speaker is, because taunts like you listed are not the ones that I'd really expect to hear in something like a high school setting and it unfortunately tends to be worse. I didn't exactly understand the motive of the bullies in this case as they didn't really have a reason to bully her other than she ends up spending all her money and perhaps they don't like her anymore because of that?

This poem tends to tackle a lot on self-image in itself which is quite the touchy topic and to an extent I find the emotions to be valid, but you don't give us a whole lot in terms of emotional weight. I want more imagery incorporated into the poem describing what's going on like the hospital with the doctors, which is something that starts off with a strong image but doesn't go much further than that. I'd like to see that kind of thing throughout the whole poem as it adds more of a reason for the readers to care about the speaker.

Another thing that I couldn't get off my mind about this was the ending because I didn't really know how to interpret or feel about it. Is it that the speaker doesn't care about being beautiful after all of the conflict that they go through, or they don't care anymore about something else? It's one of the places in the poem where I didn't really know how to respond and especially since it was the ending it felt quite abrupt. The last thing that I wanted to touch on is subtlety, which is something that I think could work well on a rewrite of your poem if you wanted to do that.

You're able to make it less extreme and more relatable, and this will make the speaker feel more rounded and human. Having the speaker perhaps do these sorts of things on a smaller scale and believe that they aren't really beautiful while still being in that popular group sometimes getting insensitive comments, I think that it would convey the message with more power because it's not entirely...outlandish? It makes the speaker more flawed and toned down with the same message, but it's really your choice on how you want to convey this. More imagery involved with the usage of repetition which is already there would make for a stronger message in the poem.

I hope I helped and have a great day! Sorry if it seems like I was a little harsh with my comments, definitely wasn't meaning to be.