Young Writers Society

Hi birk, I found this to be an interesting piece so wanted to stop by and leave a review.

For a poem called "labyrinth" I almost wanted it to be harder to understand, like if any poem is allowed to be confusing and have stilted flow it is one called "labyrinth". You could almost do-away with all of the punctuation and then squish it more (less space between lines) in order to assist in that affect -- but that's just putting my opinion out there. It also would have been interesting to put this poem into like a spiral there are websites like this one that can do that --> https://www.festisite.com/text-layout/spiral/ .

Beyond formatting, I thought that the story was neat and the working in of the Minotaur was a good add too. The line I probably liked the most was "creating walls that weren't there" just that idea of creating your own problems while also being lost in a problem of your own fits really well with this almost contradictory idea of seeking death or seeking challenge expressed in the last line. I wished you had delved even more into some of the thoughts being expressed because although I can see how they're all related it felt like you listed like 7 ideas but didn't get to really explore any of them fully. For instance the idea of creating walls, or hearing voices, or finding darkness are all distinctly different (albeit related) problems and I think each one could have been hashed out in more than one line.

Overall, I think this poem has one of the most unique messages that I've read for a while. This idea of being your own enemy in your story and the metaphor of life being an internal labyrinth is intriguing. Thanks for sharing your poem. Please let me know if you have any questions about my review.

~alliyah

Hello Birk! Kara here for a (hopefully) quick review!

Give me your soul.

With that aside, I'm not the best at poetry but here we go!

Bold = grammar and flow issues.
Italics = suggestions and overall
Strikethrough = remove
Underline = random Kara comments.

This review courtesy of

Hi there Birk! This is Kays here delving in for a review on this Sunday morning because I saw this posted before my very own eyes and I may as well review a piece in the Green Room seeing as I'm a Knight and Review Week's begun. With that being said, let's cut to the chase and begin, shall we?

I can see that this is a poem on the shorter side--only five lines long which I found to be interesting because this is pretty brief and to the point while almost creating a vague image to go along with the main point of the poem which is that the speaker became a Minotaur in their own story and even though that metaphor isn't the best detailed, we as the readers understand the gist from reading the piece.

There's almost a metaphor inside a metaphor with the speaker being a siren calling out which sets up for the last line-- I have to say that this is a lovely way to connect the actions of the speaker and the fact that the speaker (I assume metaphorically) has become the Minotaur in their own story. The metaphor inside the metaphor can become a little confusing with questions such as 'If this were literal, is the speaker a siren or the Minotaur?' although that doesn't seem to be too much of an issue because this is metaphor--the metaphor of the Minotaur being another mythical creature or the siren that we see in the third line.

Overall I'm quite the fan of this although the punctuation drags on for a little long? I'm not saying that this isn't fitting to the flow because the first four lines have a strong flow but there's certainly the possibility of breaking that up into two separate sentences so that there's a period at the end of the second and fourth line. Of course that isn't necessary but it's something to consider although if I'm being honest I really did love this poem other than the siren part being a little off-putting and the fact that the speaker being the Minotaur is a little unexplained. In what sense? What did they do to become the Minotaur? How did the transformation occur? Those are all questions that I had but yes, overall I enjoyed this one quite a bit, Birk. Nice job on this.

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask! I hope I helped and have a great day.