THE MONSTER IN THE MIRROR

Hi there - Lim here with a review!

This poem seems to depict the speaker’s change in their view of themselves. I read it as having a slow methodical pace, with each line revealing a part of a story that has been going on for “years”, as the last line emphasises. So it comes across as a slow realisation rather than a quick one. It seems to me that the speaker may not have been a “monster” initially, but did things over time that made that description seem more fitting.

I stare at myself
until the edges blur,
until I can’t tell where I end
and the monster begins.

I thought these lines were interesting in the wider context of the poem because the speaker seems to struggle between seeing themself AS the monster or seeing themself as separate from the monster but having been replaced by it, if that makes sense.

The cover image definitely spooked me. It’s very striking to see all these human-shaped figures surrounding the one figure drawn in with detail. It seems to suggest that this monster-like quality makes the speaker different from ‘everyone else’. This, together with reading the poem, seems to portray bad deeds within the context of an individual person and what choices they have made, as opposed to, for example, discussing them as the product of a society or social ills. Was this what you were going for when you chose this cover image?

Something I like about your writing here is how you position line breaks. It feels like each line adds something to the story of the poem,and the points at which you choose to start a new line emphasise those elements, such as in:

The hands are the same
,but they’ve done things
I can’t take back.

The first line emphasises that it’s not a physical change, then the second line focuses on actions the speaker did, followed by the third line that foregrounds the regret - which implies those were bad, morally wrong actions.

until I can’t tell where I end
and the monster begins.

Similarly I like how end/begins is the last word in each of these lines. I tend to pay attention to the last word of a line, so to me this really ties together the idea conveyed that the speaker and the “monster” are blurring together.

Something you might want to think about is how you use punctuation. I found that I could get the idea of the rhythm/ poem shape you were going for but felt a bit distracted when the punctuation didn’t match up to that, for example when there was no period/ full stop to end the first stanza (even though the next line then began with a capital letter). Speaking of stanzas, it might also be helpful to have a space between them, for example:

I used to look in the mirror
and see a person
now i see something else

The eyes are the same
but there's something behind them,
something darker,
something I don’t want to name.

You can do that more easily in the Publishing Center if you enable Classic editor when uploading poetry c: Sometimes having no space between stanzas can be a stylistic choice, maybe to convey that the speaker’s headspace is really cluttered, but it’s good to know you have options on that.

Something I find striking about the poem is that the speaker initially “thought they were wrong” about the speaker being a monster but gradually came to agree. I feel like that’s kind of an unusual story to tell - I haven’t seen it in other poems, at least, so it feels original and interesting to me.

Overall, I enjoyed reading this poem. While the idea of seeing a “monster in the mirror” is a popular trope, I think you gave a unique take by focusing on the speaker’s self-refection (no pun intended) and their introspection on who they have become as a person, and their realisation that they don’t like the new them. Something you might want to think about in future writing is whether the punctuation is adding to the meaning of the poem or otherwise helping to organise it the way you want (the same way your line breaks in the poem do).

Let me know if you have any questions about this review - and keep writing!
-Lim