Young Writers Society

Hi, I saw in your author's note you didn't want in depth word critiques so I'm just going to leave a few thoughts for my review and if you want feedback on something that I miss feel free to ask.

Emotional Connection
So you do a great job plugging into a focused emotion from this piece. Sometimes people write poetry about sadness (or happiness) and think "Okay, it's sad, it doesn't need focus" and then write like I'm sad about X, I'm sad about Y but never connect X & Y. In your poem though, I can see the logical progression, and it's clear how the different ideas interact around a central point. I would say the repetition of the line beginnings in the piece helped streamline it as well.

Theme
I took the central meaning to be that the speaker is tired of people trying to solve problems the speaker has when there's no way they themselves can understand what they're going through. They want the speaker to "cheer up, it's not so bad" without knowing that the speaker is putting on a strong front and slipping further into depression. Meanwhile the only people who can understand are the people who are also falling apart. The message I think can relate to a lot of people, even if they haven't experienced depression themselves, the feeling of "you just don't get it" can reach out to a lot of people.

Figurative Language and Narrative Progression
I enjoyed the multiple metaphors you used especially near the beginning "shook the hand of death" and "everything shattering". I will say I think the order of some of the statements could be improved. For instance in a poem like this you want it to kind of build up to the most serious statements. Some of the ones in the middle seemed less serious than the ones at the very beginning, so if they could be arranged in a clearer hierarchy or transition I think it would heighten the drama of the piece.

Flow
One last critique is that the flow was lacking in some parts of the poem. The most direct way to improve that for this or for future poems is to really pay attention to line length consistency -- it makes a world of difference to make sure all of your lines are around the same length. Other than that, if you go through and kind of look for words that are filler or extra that can be a good way to eliminate some of the wordiness that gets into early poem drafts.

Final Thoughts
Overall, this was an enjoyable piece to read that had clear emotional pull. Thank you for sharing your poem, and I look forward to reading more of your work in the future.

~alliyah

This speaks to me on so many levels! I love the wording as well, it explains situations like this quite well.

...wow.

I really like this. I can't say I understand your exact situation--I've never had depression. But I have severe anxiety, and on some level, I've felt this way too.

The grammar had a few problems. At one point, you use "one's" when you mean "ones". Also, I think the third and second lines of each stanza are a little awkward; if you switched them around, it might help.

But I can't truly criticize such a personal piece, beyond the superficial details I already mentioned.

Hello thePoeToaster! Kara here for a (hopefully) quick review!

Give me your soul.

With that aside, I'm not the best at poetry but here we go!

Bold = grammar and flow issues.
Italics = suggestions and overall
Strikethrough = remove
Underline = random Kara comments.