Young Writers Society

***My Thoughts***

I think this is a wonderful poem! The piece flowed very well.

***Formatting and Grammar***

The formatting was great! You ended the three different stanzas very well. There were two things I noticed that weren't exactly errors, but they weren't necessary. First, the three asterisks (*) at the end of each stanza were not necessary. The poem flowed so beautifully... until the asterisks. They cause people (or at least) to pause when you use them as separators.

The second thing I noticed was the point when you repeated "white bungalow next to" three times in the first stanza. I understand why you did that, but after two repeats, it gets boring and I lost focus.

***Punctuation and Spelling***

I didn't notice any punctuation or spelling mistakes. I appreciated how you did use full punctuation, instead of just commas or none at all (like some writers).

***Review***

Good formatting, noticed to things that were off. No spelling or punctuation errors that I caught. Happy New Year!

1.

trying to reach their essence,

***

speckled by surfeit starlight,

Wouldn't it be nice?

Press reset,

and start over,

say goodbye to every mistake, every bad decision?

Fascinating poem! I like how you played with punctuation and with the length of the lines to show the action, the thought process. The tone seems desperate, a little obsessive, yet also with this childish curiosity that I think gives this topic a fresh coat of paint.

I love so many aspects of this poem that it's hard to decide what my favorite part is!

First off, I want to say that I genuinely enjoyed the usage of repetition in each of the stanzas, as well as your use of alliteration. The first stanza in particular contains a set of lines that I find to be particularly powerful and encompassing of your main message: "A white bungalow next to / a white bungalow next to / a white bungalow..". I feel like this repetition does a great job of emphasizing the simple, almost *too* perfect idea of a row of neatly organized bungalows in a "clean" and "ideal" neighborhood in the suburbs.

The use of a rhetorical question does a lot to force the reader's attention towards the idea of living a life in which you can "reset" your mistakes; at the same time, I like that the poem is open to interpretation in a few different ways but the underlying implications remain the same.

I particularly enjoy your use of the word "meaningless" in the last stanza, as it drives home the main point (at least, from my interpretation) of questioning whether or not a perfect, always orderly life is worth living/if a life like this has any true meaning.

All in all, this was a wonderful poem, and I genuinely enjoyed reading it. Keep it up!

Happy New Year <3