cough

In an effort to remain in Team Tortoise I decided to check out my review drafts to see if anything could be salvaged! And look what I found! A review that I guess I never clicked submit on? Here you go, hope it's somewhat helpful!

Well this is fabulous, you need to write more poetry CoffeeCat!

I like how the subjects/tangents/and narrative elements sort of weaved in and out of the poem like the speaker was a bit foggy themselves - it created a neat reading experience, and the formatting mimicked that too. I almost wish the formatting was a little more "foggy"/random, or just all aligned left. Because as is, stanza 2 felt very strong with the "foggy vibes" but the first and third felt a bit like one foot was in the door, but we weren't really stepping through it one way or the other for the formatting.

Another little formatting thing that bugged me was the use of ellipses, semi-colons, and double dashes. I didn't quite get if the dashes were just there to break up the line more or if there was some symbolic purpose - but all of these elements made the poem feel a bit stilted and messy. I think it's okay to use ellipses occasionally, or semi-colons, or dashes - but to fit all of them in one short poem multiple times, just felt like we had all a lot of punctuation breaking up the flow of the piece. I'm also a big proponent of unless it is the most important line of the whole poem, never use an emphasis in formatting just once (ie. brackets, parenthesis, italics, bold) because like a single blue word in a review, it ends up standing out almost too much, and might seem random to the reader, whereas if you do it twice it lets the reader know it was for sure intentional, and gives them two opportunities to figure out a pattern or why you've used that formatting choice. So while I like the bracketed " choking a little on the burn" I think it'd be more effective repeated twice (even the same phrase would work!) I may have been missing some symbolism in them though!

Two favorite parts:

"You passed me like one passes through a doorframe,

breathing through the essence of me,

like the smoke in your lungs--"

and

"Your shirt is a green leaf spread out like a hand;

it reaches to grab at me

the more I look at it."

um wow! The line breaks are expertly done there, because each adds a new complexity/layer to the metaphor that I don't expect. It's so filled with longing, love, and mystery and yet a distance. Like the speaker can only admire from afar or through the fog.

So as far as interpretation I couldn't tell if the speaker was a lover or a good friend, or maybe even the mother of this drug using person (which might be the state of the subject, or both the speaker and subject) - but clearly someone who has mixed feelings about how the addiction is effecting their relationship which becomes a metaphor for all of the ways they're different. I sort of liked the ambiguity of the relationship and speaker.

I also liked how you carried some themes (fire, breathing, throat, otherness) from the first stanza to the last one. That offered some good continuity. Though it would have been nice to have some of those themes show up in the middle stanza too, since that one felt a bit removed. I also thought the section about the "weekend" wasn't super compelling on the first read through, because that opening line is so abstract "Each weekend is a new excuse to separate yourself." I don't quite get what they're separating out of - is it a continuation of the line from stanza one about the alien mind, or more like the leaf image? It didn't quite connect to me, and could maybe use another line to explain.

Overall, I'm super impressed with the metaphors you use, and I think it's a neat/unique story that piece together in an interesting way. I'd like to see what different formatting options might look like on this - since with the smokey theme there are certainly a lot of directions it could go.

Hope to see some more of your poetry soon Coffee!

~alliyah