Young Writers Society

Hey Cynder here. Not that you'd like a review, but I have some thoughts, if you don't mind. This was pretty well written for a poem. Most authors mess up so much you can't even really tell what they're talking about. That includes me. So props to you, and now I'll critique.

I think you had an idea for the first two lines, and it just sounded sooo good, you absolutely had to write it down. Then you thought, "Hey, this would be a good poem." So you wrote one. Here's my point, the first part was great, it was fantastic even. Then you lost the groove. Which happens. You had the perfect amount of simplicity and show rather than tell, and then the middle was all tell.

At the end, you went into your own head, and the translation was lost. As a reader, the end just doesn't flow. Put your emotion into your work, yes, but keep the sense factor so that you don't lose your readers. That is a life skill in writing, and very hard to master. However, you'll find that when you do master it, you'll be happier than you've ever been. Now that I've spoken in riddles let's see if I can talk sense.

We speak the same foreign language,
We play well together,
Or rather, our skeletons and invisible backbones play well together.

my little itty bitty note is this:

the third line of the first paragraph
"With the loneliness that oozes from their mangled forms on buildings, roads, walls."
it should be:
"With the loneliness that oozes from their mangled forms on buildings, roads and walls."

I don't know much about grammar, though I've read from other reviews there are issues. so apart from that.

good work.
kudos.

keep writing

Hey Bee! Stella here.

Wow, you have some really powerful and unusual images peppering this poem! I found myself reading through it just to see what the next image that struck home would be. I loved your description of the shadows- how their forms are mangled as they're pressed up against different surfaces, I thought that was really clever.

While your imagery really blew me away though, I thought that the whole poem felt a little bit disjointed. I mean you start by talking about the shadows and then nearer the end, we seem to be talking about something totally different. And sometimes that's good in a poem - because of course, in poetry, people are rarely talking about what they appear to be talking about on the surface. But I couldn't really follow the thread of the poem the whole way through here - it jumps to talking in abstract 'you' to a very individual 'you', and then ends on a much more sombre note than it began. Altogether I just thought that the whole thing needed to be a little bit more thematically cohesive for it to make sense the way it should.

There were a few lines which, grammatically, didn't make any sense to me, in particular these:

And these are the most cherished of the bunch.

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Those of my hopes and dreams,