Hello there! How has your day been going? I’ve dropped by to give a small review, everything is subjective, don’t take me too seriously.
From the beginning, this piece struck me with its incredible flow. It is very readable, incredibly punchy – something that I would mostly ascribe to verse and stanza structure but was also probably influenced by your lovely use of anafora (“and i am”, ”i” and ”and”, especially, words that perpetuate intimacy, a sense of being overwhelmed, and the idea of a fault within oneself, all of which are feelings that this poem absolutely wins out on). This flow, along with the aforementioned word choices pull the reader into the speaker’s world, creating a pseudo-collective experience that makes the whole thing memorable, emotionally impactful, and thematically strong as a consequence. Speaking of themes, the way you flowed from one theme to another in places like the third stanza from the end (a combination of the morbid imagery before it and the role model theme from after) worked incredibly well in communicating thought flow, chaos, and the difficulty of transcribing emotional experiences into words.
Another thing that I loved, before we get into any criticisms, is your work with imagery. Images that gained a certain connotation at the beginning (hanging in the basement, for example), went through transformation throughout. These transformations, connected as they were to relatively concrete but still-changing concepts, added great depth of meaning to the piece as a whole, allowed for a more fluid experience, and resonated with the common experience of singular things having multiple associations and connotations even within the mind of one individual person.
As far as criticisms go, at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I would point out some structural features of the poem that, in my own completely subjective and personal opinion, could potentially stand to be improved. There were times, when I wondered whether it was necessary for a verse break at that particular point, others where I considered if a restructuring of an entire stanza wasn’t in order. Not because of flow or readability, but because of meaning association. This feeling was particularly strong in the first two stanzas, when the verse breaks hadn’t started being mostly for emphasis of meaning or effectual flow. While I agree that the half-by-half kind of style added to the feeling that the speaker was rambling off an introduction to their emotional conundrum (fair enough) and made the whole thing feel hurried and breathless (understandable), there was so much variability of meaning structure in the first stanza that it started to fall apart a little, with the first verse being relatively whole thematically, the second jumping into a different topic towards the end, the third finishing its thought on the fourth line and the fourth on the sixth.
Overall, the impactful imagery that you managed to convey from the very beginning made the chaos relatively harmless, and, as I said before, I loved it regardless. I just hope to be of some potential, constructive help as a fellow sufferer.
Have a very nice rest of the day wherever you are, I wish you nothing but the best in whatever you may attempt next : )
Goodbye for now!
The Blob
Ley here to review this piece for you!
Points: 35
Reviews: 11
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