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125,020 Literary Works • 672,861 Reviews
waaat, everything was so painfully constructed, that i wondered if the repetition of mosquitoes was intentional. it had to be. it has to be, doesn't it? but it doesn't sound good; i can't wrap my mind around it. it just doesn't leave a good taste in my head. if that's what you intend, maybe, to bother like a mosquito, that's a lame way to use your talents: to trick. put them to more elegant use, alright? replace that "like stubborn mosquitos" with anything.
i like everything before the star and can't understand anything after the star. it sounds good and i like it, but it doesn't continue the tone of the first two stanzas, the nature, brown wooden, old book smell and small town gas-station tone you worked so hard to evoke, so it feels destructively out of place.
other than that, this is like a mosquito in amber: commonplace turned into a jewel, so i commend you.
let me know if you have questions.
good luck.
thank you very much!
elaborate on painfully constructed?
Specifics
1. There's so many lovely lines here but they're feeling very disconnected and for me that breaks the flow of your poem. I wouldn't want them to have a perfect flow either as that wouldn't suit the subject matter, but I feel they should be at least a little more in-line. For example, if we take your first stanza (and I hope you don't mind my playing with it) we could do something like:
That's two possible ways you could change it up, though there are others as well if you decide neither of these are quite right.
2. You've got a great way of choosing your words. I love the use of lampless. Somehow it just works. It seems to connect the fear to the moths more than the treehuggers and that makes me smile.
3. Haha. I love that romcom and Fyodor D (even that shortening of Dostoevsky is perfectly tongue in cheek) are side by side. It's brilliant.
4. I feel like 'his' should be omitted here. Just a little nitpick.
5. Not sure I like the return to mosquitos. That line feels a tad out of place and it doesn't really add anything for me.
6.
This is beautiful but don't stop there. I want the elsewhere he murmurs himself to and I want it all in a rush of words, speeding up toward the end because otherwise that rhyme is too obvious and jarring and you're not doing the set-up justice. This is too good an opportunity to miss out on!
7. I don't think the repetition of petted does you any good in the final stanza, though I like the image its giving overall of a perfect book successfully found. But petted isn't a good enough word to be there twice and doesn't give us anything new on the second reading.
Overall
This was really great. I love your choice of words and the movement of the lines. There's a few things I feel could be improved but it has a great sense of tone and life about it and makes for a great snapshot scene. Very nicely done.
Feel free to ask any questions you might have or to ask me for a second look should you make any changes. And thanks for the read.
Heather xx
thanks a lot for the review, i wanted some opinion on the rattling cough thing. i think i went overboard on getting a 'snapshot' by leaving out a 'like there is...' and just putting 'rattling cough' and 'there is...' side by side. I was unsure of whether or not it'd compliment the other ideas of a snapshot - the man disappearing as soon as he appears, for example. good you shed some light on that.
but yeah, in depth awesome and great review. thank you very much.
Oh my gosh. I have no idea what you intended the audience to get from this poem or even if you were sober when you wrote it, but it is rhythmically superb and evokes a shower of images.
I'm usually against writers who vomit vocabulary words all over the page, but yours are carefully placed and leave me speechless. On the surface, all I see is someone in the library / second hand bookstore looking for a book, describing what you see on your journey, but somehow the perception draws me into the scene and intoxicates me.
I'm not surprised you have no reviews, thus far. It is difficult to review something that seems so impressive.
thanks a bunch man!