Young Writers Society

Hey, @tgham99!

This poem of yours is profound and a powerful piece which describes the plight of a new student at school.
The title of the poem is lucid and picturises the scenario of the poem.

The first line hit the surface of emotion, every reader can relate to it. We all have experienced such situations and you've put it in idyllic sentence,

lost amongst a sea
of unfamiliar faces

Hello tgham99!

I would like to echo the first reviewer and say that this poem is 100% relatable to anyone who has spent time in a high school hallway. I think you did a fantastic job of capturing that sentiment in just a few lines. Sometimes for these big emotions (i.e., feeling overwhelmed, alone around lots of people, etc.) simple is better, in my opinion, because it packs a bigger punch. I think you're close to that big punch.

Overall, I love your choice of words. There's nothing too verbose going on here, but that also means that it really stuck out to me when words like "amongst" and "overwhelmed" found their way into the poem. It seems a little forced and, honestly, I think you would have an even more solid poem if you replaced them with simpler choices: "in" instead of "amongst", for example.

I think there is more here, too. I think it ends kind of abruptly, not to mention I'm thrown off a bit by the asymmetry of the final stanza having three lines instead of two. That's not necessarily a problem, although I'm curious what the differences offers up. I would encourage you to tap more into the emotions felt by the speaker and try to translate those into some strong, pack-a-punch imagery. In my opinion, the best way to convey emotion in poetry is not by stating it directly (e.g., "has again overwhelmed me), but by presenting it through the images that poetry is always so good at delivering.

Overall, I think this has some real potential and I quite enjoyed it. Keep writing!

Best,
Lav

A hoy hoy,

I want to start by saying that this poem is very relatable to anyone who has ever been in college or at least some type of high school and this adds to the realism of it and how easy it is to visualise. As a side not to this here are some other general comments;

First, the rhythm and length of lines varied affecting the flow and spoiling the meaning of the words. This is most notable in the second stanza which feel twice as long as every other verse.
A suggestion I can give for perhaps shortening these so that they fit better with the rest of the poem would be;
"The weight of the world becomes
a backpack upon my shoulders"
A second alteration I would recommend is the second verse of the third stanza as it also suffers from being just a bit too long. Instead, you could try something like;
"The scuffle of sneakers
the sound of careless chatter"
Remember these are just suggestions so there is no inclination to change anything like I have done here. Do it your own way, Show your style.

The only other comment towards this piece is that the odd number of lines makes it, for me, feel unfinished. I don't know if this is just a particular style of poetry I haven't heard of and you've done this intentionally, which is likely to be the case as I don't know that much about poetry. (and yet I had the idea to review a bit, it is a strange world)

Anyway, that's about it from me. Keep writing because this is a really effective poem and with a few little tweaks it can be even better.

- H.G