*Magnify*
SPONSORED LINKS
BY ONLINE AUTHORS
Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/profile/reviews/edgework/sort_by/r.review_creation_time DESC/page/7
Review Requests: ON
1,084 Public Reviews Given
1,107 Total Reviews Given
Review Style
Unsentimental. I focus on the kinds of craft issues that will keep a writer from being taken seriously and prevent them from fully expressing their vision. For more information, see "Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 
I'm good at...
Analyzing the written word and determining where a piece is not accomplishing what it wants to accomplish.
Favorite Genres
Short stories and poetry are my forte. Novels, not so much. Usually I only need to read a chapter or two to determine if it's going to go off the rails. Sometimes I'll keep reading.
Least Favorite Genres
I'll read anything.
Favorite Item Types
Anything.
Least Favorite Item Types
Pieces from authors who have never considered that writing is a craft, who nonetheless think they're great simply because they have penned the words, and who take offense when I don't agree.
I will not review...
Useful things don't always occur to me with a given piece. If I don't think I can offer insight into how the writer might become better at the task, I won't say anything.
Public Reviews
Previous ... 3 4 5 6 -7- 8 9 10 11 ... Next
151
151
Review of My Trusty iPod  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
This review is for your post on "Let's Publish! Discuss and Talk" .

Pretty damn quirky. And bloody. You're working with a good idea and you handle action and dialogue well. Your action, in particular, is clean and easily followed, a nice trick given that you're keeping several different characters in motion all the time.

I think, however, you might dial back the action just a little bit and add some connecting tissue, as well as fill in the preparatory gaps. I felt like I'd walked into the theatre in the middle of reel two. You give us about a paragraph of setup and then it's off to the Twilight Zone where we immediately encounter eviscerated assistants and stage managers who turn into fantasy monsters, all seemingly as a matter of course. Before we wander off the grid like that, we need to first establish ourselves on the grid, so we'll have some sense of how far we've travelled.

All your monsters are fully revealed from the our first encounters with them. So all we get to thinks is, "Oh. A monster." If you think about some of the really classic horror stories, there's always an element of the unexpected to be dealt with. A point where we shift from simply noting odd behavioral quirks, to reaizing OMYGOD the church organist is really the AX MURDERER!!!! or OMYGOD, the pretty teacher is really a SUCCUBUS!!!! or OMYGOD!! Nice Mr Jones next door has body parts ALL OVER HIS BASEMENT FLOOR!!!

You certainly have engineered the opportunity for this into the story as it is written; you simply haven't exploited it. What's missing is the set up scene where Hailey interacts with the Sirens and their manager and the two grouies are invited in to party with everyone, and we are lulled into thinking everything is as it appears except for the odd, off-kilter clues that don't quite make sense, of course. But those are necessary to show Hailey's progression from disbelief to the terror of acceptance, a movement from calm intellectual reactions to adrenalin crazed self-preservation instincts. And they are also necessary to facilitate the readers' misdirection. They start off thinking it's one story, and slowly realize it's a very different story. That's how you keep their attention and make them ask that Oh-so-crucial question "Gosh, I wonder what's gonna happen next?"

Don't be in such a hurry. You have some nice elements bumping up against each other. Give a little more attention to the developement, give Hailey a moment when the reader genuinely doubts that she'll survive, and then the wrap-up will come as a welcome relief. Let us get to know Hailey first, so we'll have something invested in her survival.

By the way, The Sirens are a nice touch. You can milk it for a much stronger effect. That, of course, is the primary reveal, that they really are Sirens. Right now, we first discover this second-hand in a casually tossed off comment about them. Not good for dramatic tension. We need to see them in action, and we need to see the whole process by which they engage in this ceremony that is referred to but never explained. Once you do the necessary prep work, you can turn things upside-down and descend into the depths of hell if you want. By then you'll have us hooked an we'll follow you anywhere. But you have to do a little more work first, before you can pull that off.
152
152
Review by edgework
In affiliation with Let's Publish!  
Rated: 18+ | (2.5)
I'm reviewing this poem for "Let's Publish!" .

Poems have a rough time justifying themselves. With prose, it's usually a straightforward equation: you have a point to make, an argument to rebut or a story to tell, and your language and the structure you choose either accomplish the task, or not. But in virtually all cases, the purpose around which prose gathers itself is something that resides elsewhere, with the words serving as a medium to convey us towards a specific conclusion or result.

The problem with poetry is that it's probably the most useless of creative endeavors in that poems serve no utilitarian function beyond their own immediate existence; nor are they expected to. This isn't to say that poems can't have subjects or that they can't be "about" something, but the surface language of a poem needs to function in a strikingly different relationship to that subject than what is found in prose. In prose, language is the servant of its subject. In poetry, subject is the playtoy of language. In a poem, language calls the shots and while there is no restriction against actually "making sense," neither is there a rule that says it must conform to a prosaic notion of what sense entails.

Maybe you can see where I'm going with this. You are restricting this poem to a prose sensibility. You want to tell us about the hidden illness, you identify this purpose in your title and then you move through a narrative treatment of the points you want to make, all in a linear, logical, cause and effect progression. This is not a failing of the writing; the writing is fairly engaging and the topic is certainly compelling. It's just not a poem. It's prose, and the fact that it's broken up into lines isn't going to fool an editor looking for poems that surprise, that take unexpected twists and turns and even bore wormholes below the surface of the words only to pop out in some unexpected place.

In fact, those lines are a good place to begin rethinking your approach to poetry. Nothing separates poems from prose more distinctly than the line. There is nothing comparable in prose structures. The line, and it's attendant break, is your single most powerful tool to create tension, engineer subtleties of meaning not present in the surface content of the words, and establish rhythmic counterpoints to the content and natural flow of the words. Right now you have a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of your content, and each line. But before you get to line breaks that have some punch, I'm going to suggest some brutal surgery on the words in those lines.

Right now everything is narrated. Despite the fact that the poem purports to be about madness, the narrative voice is calm, collected, clearly in control and in touch. Rational. Logical. Each element is described through a narrative shorthand that stands between the reader and the actual experiences. In a poem like this, when so much depends on conveying the tension that is affecting you, both emotional and psychological, you need to evolve a language of immediacy that will not just tell the reader what you felt and thought, but which will recreate that experience for them, allowing them to be present in those moments, feel what you felt, hear what you heard and walk the paths you walked. You need to make your experience their experience. You want them to be active participants, not passive observers.

These are some of the red flag lines:

Slowly recalling the turn of events, that brought me here.

How none of this is intentional, how my emotions are in command.

Emotions tumbling over one another, each jockeying for a spot,

Head reeling with inner voices, can't distinguish what's mine and not.

Leaving scars of my torment, my frustration.
I cry and cry, without knowing why
You think I'm being dramatic.
You think I'm just begging for attention.
How wrong can a person be?

In each case we get an expository distillation of what was clearly a moment of extreme drama, moments forever denied us, forced as we are to simply take your word for it that they were intense. This is one of those places where a misguided attempt to make sense forces you to avoid all the linguistic techniques available to you to actually capture a mind besieged by madness in the act of trying to express itself, comprehend what is happening and communicate with the sane world beyond its borders. That's not a mind in the midst of calm narration and the experience of such a mind wouldn't necessarily make sense. Would a poem that succeeds in capturing that state of mind "make sense?" Not for the logical circuits of the prosaic part of our brains, certainly. So? Poems aren't addressing those circuits. What this poem needs to do is slug us in the gut.

You need to go back to all those abstract generalizations like "...my emotions are in command" and swap all of them out for real images. Crisp, sharp images that crack the skull, make the eyes water and force you to catch your breath. In other words, you have to work. You have to dig for those hard nuggets of experience that will breath life into this poem and our reading of it. You have to sweat, and if you do it right, you'll force us to sweat as well. You are trying to capture an experience of intense pain and torment. To do so, you're going to have to gouge an open wound onto the page. That's something that will capture an editor's attention.


"Writing Hurts: Review Forum" 
"Invalid Item" 

153
153
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You have some interesting things starting up here, which is good, given that it's a prelude and needs to snag your reader for whatever is to come. Of course, there's no way to know what's going to come yet, so we have to judge the piece on its own merits.

Right now, while you've done some of the important work of introducing your characters and provided the context in which your story will unfold, I'd say that the most this aspires to is conveying information to the reader. Nothing wrong with that, of course; it's necessary content, but content alone does not make a compelling narrative, even if, as is the case here, the content is about dramatic events with perilous implications.

What we have going on here is an elderly couple who clearly have a strong relationship, sharing breakfast with their grandson, who clearly thinks highly of them both, and who agrees to perform a task that his grandfather requests of him. He agrees, I might add, with no reservations, second thoughts or resistance.

This is a fair description of the surface action, apart from the content that action is trying to convey, which is that a major metaphysical war is looming upon which hinges the fate of the universe... or some such. Unfortunately, you can't channel the high-stakes intensity of your information to prop up the banal and pedestrian action that makes up your narration. If you want to grab us, from the first paragraph, you need to write a scene that captures that drama, not simply refers to it.

It doesn't have to be all thunder and lightning either. I mentioned the fact that your characters all seem to get along just fine and appear to hold each other in high regard. Great. Love it, I admire them for it. But you know what? People who get along, who enjoy each other's company and who don't seem to have any issues with much of anything are the people you want in your own life, not in your stories.

Stories are about tension, conflict, difficulties and problems that demand attention in one way or other. They are about characters who have to wade through the complexities of whatever situation you've conjured up for them. If you make things too easy for them, there's nothing to engage the reader, nothing to make them wonder what's going to happen next. Nothing, actually, to suggest that there might be a next to wonder about at all.

I fear that this prelude may speak to a fundamental flaw in your whole approach. Despite your innovative setup, to which you've obviously given some considerable thought, unless you imagine your characters in terms of what it is that needs to be altered in their lives, what conflicts they encounter, what difficulties face them, and unless you present them in the midst of the process of working through their problems in each and every scene, you won't have a compelling narrative to convey your ideas.

Understand, there's nothing wrong with a grandson liking his grandparents, or the two grandparents liking each other and their grandson. It's just not the part of the story you want to highight as the teaser and hook to capture your reader. Problems, problem, problems: that's the meat of a story. But that's only part of it. It's the struggle to solve them that will keep readers turning the pages. You want them engaged at the start, or they won't stick around long enough to see what you have in mind.
154
154
Review of Lunch  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 18+ | (4.5)
Sig for reviews

I can't say much more about this, the third version of the story that I've read. You've done a lot of work on it and it shows. It's a solid story, well written with an ending that doesn't try to tie everything up in a neat tidy package but which definitely brings the story to a point of closure. Whatever happens next will be a different story, but we don't need to contemplate that potential development to appreciate what we have here. I hope you are planning to submit this. I think you will find a place for it.

Nice work.
155
155
Review of Lunch  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
Sig for reviews

I reviewed the original version of this story and commented on the revision. Now there's this incarnation. I don't have a lot more to say about the revisions, actually, other than I think you have a strong story here. It's a complex relationship you are describing, and the two women have complicated reactions to each other. You manage to use their issues with food as a condition that affects both of them, without the story actually being about food disorders. It's about the two of them and their relationship.

I like what you're doing with the ending, but I agree that it's still in progress. I'm not sure what she's doing there, for one thing. I also think you need to explore further, find out what it is about that memory that is truly significant. It's the kind of subtext that can provide the completing link in the chain, but you haven't quite established the relationship. Nor have you really set us up for the scene shift. I don't mean you should fill the opening scenes with thoughts of her dying grandfather... but the images of the hospital stand in stark contrast to the superficial comfort of the food. Using cold, sterile, antiseptic images to describe what Leslie is experiencing would work subtly as a counterpoint to the surface activity, which we already understand isn't really something that gives her any pleasure. It's the kind of connection that exists outside the immediate narrative flow, but which helps establish the broader context in which everything takes place.

Just keep in mind that if you surprise us, it needs to be seen as inevitable in light of all that has come before. If you simply start with one story and then move into a different one, we'll be surprised but we won't be impressed. Make everything count and make sure there's a central core into which everything feeds. Hospital images could do that, making the point that whatever it is that we are witnessing here, it has little to do with health. If you set us up properly, you won't need to explain the ending since it will be a natural development. We might not know exactly what is going on, but we'll understand nonetheless.

I'm getting picky here, but i really like this story, and I'd like to see you submit it. I think, in its original version, you might have thought that it was just about the food. What you are evolving with it now is something that moves beyond its immediate topic and touches on some universal themes. In short, it's becoming the kind of story that a reader will remember.
156
156
Review of SECOND CHANCES  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

I've looked at a couple other poems in your portfolio, having found this one quite entertaining. You're good. You can be better, and should start doing your homework.

This type of verse, when done right, looks easy. What is easy is finding rhyming words; English is such a cluttered closet of linguistic traditions that there's always a word to rhyme (okay, orange and door hinge}/i} is a stretch). What's difficult is to slip the rhymes into a natural reading of the words and make them sound like they belong there, that you'd have spoken the words this way in any event. You do appear to have a natural flair for this type of verse, and it's fun to read.

One thing I strongly advise is that you study scansion and apply it to your lines. Simply put, good scansion is a way to organize the syllables in your lines (not words, mind you, syllables) into strong and weak beats, making sure that you don't fall into patches of too many weak beats, as you do in the second and third lines of your fist stanza:

A LOVE / that WAS
re CIP / ro ca ted
she LEFT / and
I was / DEV as / TA ted

The first and last lines scan well enough, although the strong beat on was is asking a bit more of the word than it's able to provide, but the last line forms into three trochees nicely. But look at that patch of four weak beats in a row between the second and third lines. You lose the poetic flow there, falling into a lazy prose rhythm. What usually happens when you attempt to repair a line like that is that you will tend to come up with an image that carries a lot of the weight for you in a more concise package, instead of flabby interpretive words like reciprocated., and your poem is the stonger for it.

I's say that you apply that idea to the whole poem, actually; you need to match your facility with rhyme to an ability to come up with images that capture the essence of what you're trying to say, freeing you of the need to actually say it, which is never as satisfying. Your fourth stanza is the weakest for this reason; it is simply you telling us a result and feeding us a conclusion. Far better to offer us the experience of sadness and lonliness; we'll come to the right conclusion ourselves, not as observers but as participants.
157
157
Review of A Halloween Story  
Review by edgework
In affiliation with  
Rated: 13+ | (5.0)
Sig for reviews

Not much to say here. You do it all well. Aside from the disturbing subject, I like the way you handle the flashbacks, first the one with the PTA mothers, then the crucial one later on. Flashbacks are tricky and offer all manner of opportunities to disrupt the flow of your story and generally run thing off the tracks. You avoid this without blinking. John's recollection of the PTA incident is a perfect examle of how backstory should be eased into the narrative, inobtrusively, supporting the forward momentum rather than forcing a time out from it. The second flashback is effective since it mirrors the action in the present and provides the context that makes it understandable, again never breaking the momentum of the present action.

You might consider pointing out John's special Trick or Treat mission a bit more than you have now. It's easy to miss. Then again, you might not. You know your stuff well enough to make a choice that works.

I enjoyed this. I hope you are submitting it.
158
158
Review of Hobgoblins  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

You say This story was accepted and published by my college literary magazine last fall. I was quite pleased with myself, but then I read the other stories they accepted... let's just say I wasn't so thrilled with their selectivity (or lack thereof).

Okay, so in your case they got it right. I like what you are doing here and I like your style. The ideas you're juggling are strong. There are some narrative issues I'm going to pick at (because that's just what I do), and an overall structural problem that I think keeps this from being as strong as it could be. But for all that, it's pretty good as is.

First the narrative issue. You open your story as though it were a movie or television script. We get dialogue and action; what we don't get is the visual and aural clues that would accompany the lines. Up there on the movie screen in your mind, Diane speaks the first line without preamble or explanation, but even if the screen were to remain black we'd hear her voice, we'd probably hear the sound of the car driving down the highway, and so we'd be suitably oriented. None of that accompanies the prose you've offered because you haven't given us a prose version of the scene. Understand, prose is neither stronger nor weaker, it's simply different and calls for a different way of approaching the problem. You can't just transcribe the movie version; you have to build your environment for us with words. As it is now, we go eight or nine lines before we know that the opening speaker is female. It's all well and good to leave the reader disoriented if there's a reason and a payoff for it. The only reason here is you haven't botherd to orient us. Forget the movies. They have their own language and symbolism and their effects don't translate into prose. (The reverse is usually true as well; note how anything by Doctorow or Tom Wolfe that's been made into a movie has really sucked). Use your considerable abilities to exploit the written language and mine it for all its potential.

I focus so much on what is, admittedly, a very brief portion of the story for two reasons. One, I think you could use the opening far more effectively to set the stage, clue us in on the crucial aspects of the relationship and set us up for what comes after. The other is that you are doing something similar throughout the rest of the story—assuming a context that you haven't actually created. You've told us about it, assured us that it exists, but you haven't actually done the hard work of calling it into existence.

A structure like this demands that you find a way to tell two stories. The real story, where all the crucial stuff took place, stretches back into the past. The problem with the past is that there's no sequence of events, no time flow. The past is always with us; not only that, all of it is with us, all at once. The only way to create a narrative flow with the past is to plunge into the risky currents of flashbacks; they will either interrupt the present story and annoy the reader, or they'll prove far more interesting, raising the question "Why not just tell that story?" What makes an elaborate and crucial backstory manageable is to create a real story in the present; real in the sense that there is a problem and a goal and a series of actions that must take place to achieve that goal. It might not be the story, but it's a useful framework to allow the actual tale to come forth.

Your problem is that you have virtually no story in the present. There is a fleeting reference to a funeral, and as we read we assume that their Grandfather has passed on, but that event really has no direct relevance to the current action. In truth, none of the backstory has a direct impact on the present action, which consists of Diane's fears that Todd is planning to kill himself, and her apparent success in preventing this. This minimal action could be placed within any family history with no elements needing modification. And so we spend most of our time inside Diane's thoughts, listening to her recall and reflect on the past and ponder the problems in the present; we can't avoid noticing that when such thoughts claim center stage, nothing is actually happening.

Still, the relationship between Diane and Todd, and the way you are trying to deal with it, is compelling. Anything of interest will come out of that relationship and their interaction, not events narrated out of the dark, dusty past. Quite frankly, we don't really care about the past. You should care about it, of course, because it is what gives coherence to the present. But your job as a story teller is to create a story in the present. Its logic and coherence will derive from the past, but we don't need to know all of it, or any of it, really. You spend so much time trying to get all the back story in that there's no time left over for anything to happen. It becomes a habit, so that even when the opportnity is there, you opt instead for internal rumination. For example, this passage:

“Just leave me alone,” he said, and walked away.

She watched him go but couldn’t move, just stood there in the muddy tangle of his clothes. He had a gun. For a crazy moment, she thought of secret enemies and threatening men, drugs and cash, Todd in deep with something sinister, but no. That wasn’t Todd. Todd was sudden screaming and long silences, mild dark eyes and his soft, collapsing face. The gun had to be for him.

Note the scene you neglected in favor of this exercise in avoidance and stasis. How much stronger if, instead of getting rid of one of your two main characters and leaving the other to stew silently, alone, you'd let them actually interact? Show us Todd's sudden screaming and sullen silences. Have her confront him about the gun. Have him respond. How should he respond? I don't know, he's not my character. But you're going to have to find out, and set them both loose, because when you do let them talk, your writing is believable and your characters are revealed as people we want to know more about.

This is not a heavily plotted story, nor does it need to be. But if you are going to hinge the tale on the relationship between two characters, you'd better find a way for them to engage in that relationshop. Telling us that Todd's the kind of guy who doesn't interact won't cut it. That's not the story you mean to write. Or it shouldn't be. Your job is to pick up on them at the point where the status quo is no longer tenable. You've given Diane seven years of pent-up bile and resentment. Now she's got a chance to resolve some things, and maybe break through to Todd. And she's got some righteous anger boiling just below the surface as well. He, on the other hand, is a basket case of symptoms. He's been running for years. If he's forced to stop and finally confront his demons... well, I don't know what will happen, but if you'll get out of the way and let them go at it, we all just may find out.

And then there are those proverbial demons. The Hobgoblins a fascinating idea, but one which doesn't quite get the job done. I think this is another element that makes sense to you and Diane, but which is missing the connecting tissue that would seamlessly integrate it into the story. It's a strong extended metaphor for what's taking place, but the image of the empty bowl is too much a part of the mundane world for the supernatural aspect to come through. You've gone out of your way to establish the spirits as an entity, albeit one that may simply be imagined. What you haven't done is let your story make a decision about them: real or imagined? Superstition or proof of unseen realms? Silly fairy tales or possibilities of redemption? Creatures who benignly haunt childrens' dreams, or seal peoples' souls?I think these issues are present in your thinking. You need to weave them into the text, and you need to decide how you want your readers to view the question, and make sure that you give them the necessary material to allow them to reach the desired conclusion. Right now, the spirits are just mentioned, they exist on a paralle track, but they don't come into the narrative in any kind of influential way. Of course, you can't just tell us that they're real. That won't work either. You have to create the kind of world that simply leaves us with no doubt.

I like your writing style. When you're not taking the kind of shortcuts that I pointed out earlier, you score some big points. Learn to recognize those shortcuts and edit them out of your thinking. Eventually, you'll catch them before they creep in, and you'll be writing the kinds of scenes that your stories deserve.
159
159
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

I've read this a few times to make sure I'm certain about what I want to say. I'm giving this a 3.5. If you've read the intro to my forum, you know that I consider 4.0 publishable. Everything below suggests some degree of "needs work." In this case, I could well be wrong. You just might find a place for this if you submit it enough; it's that well written. However, I think you could find a place for it with a lot less effort if you fine tune it more. That means you're going to have to get out of Jay's way and let him do what comes naturally.

The reason I read it several times is that there's nothing specific you are doing wrong and much that you are doing right. Your style is fine. Everything about the sound and rhythm of your prose facilitates a smooth experience for the reader. You do a good job of presenting a fantastic, unbelievable set-up in a way that lets us simply accept that it is so, wisely avoiding any efforts to actually explain how the situation works. We're more than willing to accept that there is a larger context for this story in which this situation makes perfect sense; we don't need all the details and backstory.

One area that I think could be enhanced is the erotic content—nothing graphic, mind you. But face it, that aspect would be both a major selling feature for a guy like Jay, and it would make his ultimate disappointment much more palpable. Any story is strengthened when you capture the core essence of an experience and allow the reader to place themselves in the midst of the action; in a story like this, when that core experience is merely referenced and referred, what remains is sort of beside the point.

We discover at the end that Jay has found Anna lacking in a crucial, though somewhat indefinable, element. But up until then we haven't seen him confront the issue. These sentences would seem to accomplish that task:

Thursday is less happy. When he wakes up she is in the other room, recharging. He stays in bed, unwilling to see her like that. Rolling onto her side of the bed, he breathes in her perfume; it is crisp and sweet. But he knows that she sprayed it there deliberately while he pretended to sleep. And there is no other smell, no underlying trace of a real person, of hormones or sweat.

but this is precisely what I meant when I suggested that you are referring to the situation, not showing as it unfolds for us. You tell us that she is recharging. There's an entire missing scene of Jay getting out of bed to look for her, seeing her in whatever alien, mechanized state she's in, staring silently, saying nothing, and slipping away without letting her know he's there. We'll get the point, and we'll know he gets the point. Likewise telling us that she sprayed her perfume scent there while he pretended to sleep. You need to let that action unfold in real time as well. Show Jay lying there in the dark, unable to sleep, not sure what's bothering him, watching her get out of bed, listening to the sound of the spray bottle, smelling the faint aroma, reacting, in spite of himself to the pheromones flooding his brain, noting his unwilling reaction.

He doesn't have to have it all figured out at this point. That is, actually, the point. He's in the process of figuring it out, and we're right there with him, figuring it out for ourselves as well. The paragraph I quoted simply hands the experience to us gift wrapped. We'd rather participate in it as it happens.

What you're missing here is the opportunity to create dramatic tension by providing Jay with a character arc that draws him from one state to something altogether different. It is that process of change that will provide the reader with a reason to keep reading, not the clever setup (and it is clever, I'll grant you that). Right now Jay is too flat. You tell us what he sees (her clear eyes, her dry skin, the coolness of her body) but what's missing is the journey he takes from excited, hopeful optimism to whatever he has come to realize by the end of the story. That would be a path fraught with contradictions, confusion and difficult decisions for any person in a similar situation. You need to work to uncover those moments of character development, and you can't make the decision easy for him. Anna, to be sure, has some definite advantages. He could easily come to terms with the downside in favor of having a fantasy come to life. But he has to want that fantasy in order for his decision to reject it to have an impact. All it takes is making him honest. Let him act the way any man would act in the same situation. He'll figure out what to do.
160
160
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

This doesn't make much sense. Nothing at all wrong with that, understand; it creates a nice kind of ambiguity, hinting at this and that, suggesting situations and states of mind that let readers bring their own experience to the table and get involved. Participate, instead of just standing off to the side and watching.

Furthermore, "sense" in a poem is a treacherous concept. Too often it means "prose sense," which is the logical unfolding of an argument, position or narrative, an idea that assumes that the degree to which such sense is achieved is directly related to how well the language conveys these elements that are external to it. Poems can be "about" something, of course, but what will make it memorable is not the argument, or the story, or how well it manages to describe an object; that's why why we have prose, after all. A poem enjoys a very different relationship to the external elements—its subject, if you will— that form it's content. Poems get to turn their subjects into silly putty, twist and warp them, turn them inside-out, make wholly unsupported leaps of perspective and context, and, in general, weave a landscape that might resemble the world out there, but which is under no obligation to adhere faithfully to it. It might be a landscape that exists only within the language itself, for it is language which is the poem's primary focus.

I get the feeling you probably wouldn't disagree with any of the preceding, and there are some interesting things going on here. Overall there is a nice musical flow to your lines. They sound good. But I think there are a couple of areas in which you need to refine your thinking a bit, and you'll have a much stronger piece.

These four lines,

For on the edge of nothing but denial, torturous feelings hang.

Within your eyes' graceless furnace, turned my deep empathy into ashes.

For in me, your face lies faint, fading in time, fumbling to survive,

The hands that once caressed, now pounce and fire back.

suggest that you haven't quite relinquished your desire to make prose sense. A subject lurks here in the background, it comes closest to the surface in these lines, despite the effort at decorative language to keep it from dominating the stage. But the paradigm shift that is called for will take place when you realize that in a poem like this, subject does not dictate language so much as it rises out of it. It might not always be logical and tightly focused, but neither should it restrict itself narrowly to one moment, location idea or effect. Your language is already trying to break out of these restrictions; I sense a much stronger poem here waiting to be written, one that perhaps uses the metaphor of a failed relationship as a jumping off point rather than the fixed center around which every revolves.

A useful place to start would be to replace all the cliches with sharp, vibrant images. Phrases like

torturous feelings hang

your face lies faint, fading in time, fumbling to survive

Ashes of agony

are lazy constructions all, pretentious bits of puffery that act significant but which communicate nothing. I suppose there is a meaning of sorts behind each of them that could be said to be what is communicated, but it's not worth the effort, not in a poem that requires language that engages the reader with something surprising, something that forces them to stop being a spectator and contribute something to make the experience of the poem their own experience as well. Crisp visual images, sharp language that evokes emotional intensity. The kind of images that don't pop easily into your head without any effort. Never trust those easy images; they stopped surprising anyone centuries ago.

Still, no one could make the argument that you've simply taken prose and cut it into arbitrary lines and called it a poem. This is not prose and a poetic sensibility lies at the heart of it. Find the courage and make the effort to take it as far as it deserves to be taken. It'll be worth it.
161
161
Review of Catharsis  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

The most immediate question that comes to mind, after reading this, is Why? What was your purpose in writing this? What is it that you wish to offer your reader? What is it about this story that you feel needs to be shared with the public? What lesson, possibly, do you think we should glean from this narrative? What entertainment value do you believe is present?

That's what happens when you write a story like this; no matter how proficient the craft (and yours is considerable), we inevitably are forced to overlook questions inherent in the writing, and instead turn our questioning gaze on you. You probably didn't intend that, but it's hard to avoid, given the nature of this piece.

As I began reading through this, I had a few issues with the structure—it felt like you had too much of your chronology locked away in backstory, always a potential red flag. Nonetheless, you captured Virginia's lonliness and loss.

Then you jump the tracks, but even with the arrival of the package and its obvious contents, you haven't lost us. Grim reality certainly has a place in any story if properly handled. You handle the grim, realistic part with easy assurance: overwhelmingly so, with close-up precision.

What you neglected to include was the story part. Strip away the graphic details and you are left with a character who is simply acted upon by nameless, faceless forces of malevolence with no insight into any reason for such a thing to take place. She is powerless, takes no action and can offer nothing to affect the outcome of events. The message is hopeless despair, with no hope of redemption. Why, I will ask you again, would you think such a message would appeal to anyone?

The only audience you might communicate with is one comparable to the audience for graphic pornography. This contains no sexual content, but it is pornography nonetheless: graphic details that exist for no purpose other than the surface content of the graphic details themselves. Pornography, at least, facilitates a potentially pleasurable state, if only temporarily. I'd hate to contemplate the activity that this writing might facilitate.

You have a clear ability to translate your imagination into compelling words. Unfortunately, it's wasted on writing like this. And if you think I'm just being squeamish over the content, guess again. There is a relationship between the world of fiction and the basic structures of the civilization that provides a context for that fiction. When you use elements in your writing that would commonly be thought of as extreme, you need to make it count for something. A story about two young lovers who have a quarrel, and one of them seeks revenge by slashing the other's tires would call for one level of intensity. You could not, however, simply replace that bit of vandalism with a scene of one of them taking a meat ax and hacking the other into hamburger, and keep the rest of the story unchanged. You need to account for the intensity of the situation you create, and your resolution (when you decide to provide one) needs to match the set-up in scope, intensity and impact. I realize that you haven't bothered to resolve anything here, chosing instead to leave Virginia in a special version of hell. But, should you decide to turn this into a story, keep in mind that you have set yourself a severe challenge. If you can come up with a structure large enough and strong enough to hold the situation you've created, you'll have something to brag about.

As it is now... not so much.
162
162
Review of Chronosphere  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You've put together some interesting elements that could form the basis of a solid story, but you're going to have to do a bit of homework if you want to make it happen. At the heart of the piece you have a decent premise and situation: rivals compete for a prize and their personalities and essential natures determine the specific obstacles and choices they face. The interest for the reader will be in that competition, but you've sabotaged yourself in the way you've chosen to present it.

I think you need to retrace your steps, go back to the authors you admire, who have influenced you and who you would like to emulate. Read them again, all of them, not as a consumer but as a student. Read them as though your assignment is to figure out what they are doing and how they are doing it, and to reach a point where you are able to imitate them. Nothing wrong with imitation. It's the best way to learn what works. It's also a good way to discover the distance between where you are now, and where you'd like to be.

As you study your writers, note how they choose to describe events; note, in particular, which events warrant a close-up full detailed depiction, and which ones they compress into more abstract narrative statements. Note how you choose to respond to each approach and assume that readers will likewise respond to your writing. Notice, too, that in stories that work (and which have been published and maybe anthologized) characters don't just talk to fill up space. Each statement is a carefully selected means of moving the plot forward or of revealing something important about their personalities and their inner drives. Learn why the writers who inspire you would never have forced their characters to do what you've done to Righty and Black in the opening scene: engage in an extended conversation where they do nothing but remind each other of things that they've clearly known for months, or however long they've been on their voyage. This type of conversation exists solely to tell the reader what is going on and it is death wherever it appears; when it opens the story, you won't recover.

What it shows is that you really have no particular story for these two characters; if you did, you'd have them discuss that. Or, better, you'd show them engaged in whatever process it is that makes up the opening elements of your plot. You know, the kind of things that get a reader interested and make them want to know what's going to happen next. You attempt something like that in the opening paragraph with a fairly stirring description of a deadly hurricane that threatens to send them all to the bottom of the ocean. Not bad. You could certainly have come up with a lot worse ways to open a story. But then there's that endless conversation about your story idea (remember, first and foremost: ideas are not stories), and somehow the storm ceases to matter. In fact, the conversation could just as easily have been relocated to a stuffy Gentleman's club back in London or New York over a bottle of port and smelly cigars. And so you miss the opportunity that the opening scenes give you to set the pace and establish the conflict and you expose your storm as simply an effect for the moment with no particularly significance other than the fact that they're pirates and they're at sea so, sure, there should be a storm. But there's no reason in this story for this storm. When you do that, your reader will eventually stop looking for connections to the main narrative stream, since there aren't any.

While you have a conflict of sorts, it's a prefabricated conflict and it exists only because you create a situation that calls for two characters to race to the treasure. You give us no indication of who these two characters are, however. You mention that they're lifelong friends, which immediately turns strange when they become locked in a life and death struggle. They are competing for a treasure but we don't have any connection to the prize or any sense of why it's important to them. It all feels like a couple of guys walked onto a soundstage and ended up in the story because they were the first two guys who wandered in and they got hired. Plots aren't just about things happening (which, I'll grant you, you've give us in healthy doses); they're about things happening to particular people, and the ways they respond to them. And each other. It is the people, not the events, that make us turn the pages.

At the heart of this is an interesting set up, as I mentioned. The challenges and tests are your money shots and you need to rethink the way you are dealing with them. It's not enough to simply tell us that a choice is difficult and then tell us what the choice turns out to be. You need to take us inside the process itself, let us live through the deliberation, feel the indecision, the conflicting pressure pulling this way or that. You need to let the process unfold for us. It's the difference between a rip roaring bar fight, and the police report that later describes what went on. You too often opt on the side of the report. We want the action, the sweat, the blood, minute by minute, detail by grizzly detail. You devote several paragraphs to the opening conversation, yet, the challenge with the rock is disposed of in a few lines. It's a good puzzle and an interesting solution. You need to milk it. Drag it out. Build the tension. Get us right next to Black, biting our nails in anticipation. How's he going to solve it? What's he going to do? Will he make it? If you simply let us know that, 1) there's a problem, and 2) then he solves it, we don't get to go along for the ride, because there's no ride.

And then... well, there's Aphrodite. Look, I don't want to put too sharp an edge on this, but if you're going to introduce a naked Aphrodite into your story, you're going to have to delve into the mysteries of eroticism. Notice I did not say porn. No need to make anything obscene. Quite frankly, porn is always far more interesting in the contemplation than the actual experience anyway. Likewise with Ms. Goddess. While you never collapse into porn, you commit the same offense in that you settle for mere phenomena rather than the shades of meaning, the echoes, the ambiguities, the layers of context and association that create a truly erotic moment. This line makes my point:

He could see thin beads of water flowing down her naked body, emphasizing every curve and every muscle. When she moved, he could see her muscles flex and move under her skin.

Okay, it's probably true, but unless he's a professional body builder, it's not really what would be going through his mind. As a writer, you need to create those ripples of subtext through imagery, not just physical description. You also need to leave space for the reader to supply their own imaginative contribution, another thing that's impossible with porn.

While the competition is where all your action (and interest) is to be found, it won't be truly satisfying for the reader unless we get a sense of what is at stake for the men engaged in the battle. And why. Yeah, there's the treasure. That can work, but only if the characters are sufficiently well crafted to make us want them to either succeed or fail. Gotta make us want something, and it usually doesn't matter what it is. And show us stuff happening whenever possible. Don't settle for some second-hand narration after the fact. We'd love to see Righty's tests, since they are clearly very different than Black's. What better way to show us who he is and allow us to make up our minds about each of them. Instead, you have Mr. Natural with the beard holding the reader's hand, telling us everything we're supposed to think, and telling us all the stuff we'd rather see for ourselves.

This could be a good action story. Cut away the unnecessary parts, bring out the dramatic tension that's built into your scenes and then try not to interfere with your characters. They'll do just fine if you'll only let them. Make them honest and we'll want to know more.
163
163
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You say of this piece, Three people's lives share a common thread, the Tamarind. I suppose that's so, given that each of them is having lunch at the same bar and grill, though whether or not they're all there at the same time is never established. In fact, it's a little misleading to suggest that there is a common thread, or anything in common between them, since the bar has no relvance to any of their personal stories, and none of them interacts at all. What you have are three totally separate pieces arbitrarily placed in the same work. In addition, none of them qualifies as a story.

What they are is the prose equivalent of the scales and arpeggios that a musician practices to hone and develop the elements that will be necessary when it comes time to actually play music. As such, they are undeniably valuable and I wish more writers would practice like this: set some characters in motion, watch them move around, listen to them talk, see what they're up to in the process of just being themselves. When it comes time to engage such characters in a real plot, you'll already know them and will find it much easier to let them move around and find their own way to the story.

Of the three segments, the one that comes closes to kicking off a story is the second vignette. Julia has a goal and it defines her actions and this makes it easy for you to put words in her mouth and thoughts in her head. You've intentionally cut away just before the story got going, but the set-up is solid. We want to know what comes next. Gotta make the reader wonder that, or you don't have a reader.

The other two sections have nothing to occupy your characters, no goal, nothing they need, or need to avoid, nothing that presents itself as a complicating circumstance requiring decisions and actions. For this reason, you end up putting lots of stuff in their heads in order to let the reader know what they're like. That's the problem with imagining your characters solely on the basis of their personaities: all you really have to talk about is who they are. Stories require characters who have played out whatever status quo they find themselves in and are thus compelled to do something about it. That's called motivation and you'll find that it has a prominent place in any Story—101 text. For good reason—nothing's more torturous than trying to fill up sentences, paragraphs and pages with characters who have nothing to do. The only thing worse than trying to write about such characters is trying to read about them. For this reason, if your characters have nothing to do, you will probably have no readers. Need to look at that.

The obvious suggestion for a set-up like this is to develop out the individual character arcs in such a way that they collide with each other and begin to cross-pollinate. A more subtle approach would be to create situations for each of them that remain separate but which are directly impacted upon by the location itself, so that there is, in fact, a reason for placing the separate tales in this location. As it is, they could be in a Denny's, a Taco Bell or any old bar in any old town. Nothing wrong with any old bar in any old town, but it means that placing al three in the same location is a wasted effect, one that makes us sit up a bit and expect something to develop from it. It also means we'll be disappointed when nothing develops at all. Gotta keep alert to those pesky reader expectations, particularly when you've gone out of your way to set them in motion in the first place.

You seem to have a handle on the sound of prose, the blending of dialogue and description, and all the other elements that make for effective narratives. All you need now is a plot. And characters driven to make something happen, prevent something from happening, or make something stop. At that point, get out of the way; they'll show you the story.
164
164
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

I like this, as well as some of the other things in you portfolio that I read. I have two observations that might point to ways to make it stronger.

I feel that you need to make a decision regarding whether to rhyme, or not. Right now you rhyme here, but not there, and then here comes another rhyme; sometimes they work well, as in the first stanza, sometimes not so much as in

But their hands of red

Is why they fled

For their own fates were now sealed

And their heads would be peeled.

While none of the rhyming lines can be said to be wrong, neither to they create the kind of structural underpinning that a firm rhyme scheme can establish. A poem like this with it's short lines of free meter doesn't really lend itself to a fixed pattern and so the rhymes that you do have simply stand out as isolated effects, fine as far as they go but offering nothing to the overall impact of the poem beyond their single moment. You might consider breaking your lines to carry some of your thoughts (and rhymes) across the breaks; at the moment you pretty much have one specific idea or image per line, and only that one. It all gets to be a bit monotonous, despite the fact the your lines actually vary in their scansion. More interesting enjambment would keep the effect of the rhyming words, without calling attention to themselves as end rhymes, and it would give a more complicated reading as well, pulling the reader forward through the dissonance between the lines and the formation of the ideas within them.

The other point is that you might want to open this up more. As it is, the whole poem is focused pretty much within the same spatial and contextual coordinates. It's all about the assassination and those responsible. But forcing a poem to restrict its scope like that is a wasted opportunity. You could effortlessly pull back your metaphysical camera, so to speak, and incorporate a meditation on friendship, loyalty, the death of tyrants, history and its randomness, history and its predetermined flow, maybe the insignificance of the earthly plane when viewed from across the veil... heck, you pretty much get to do anything you want. If you want. You should. The set up calls for it and it would complete a nicely written piece.
165
165
Review of Faithless  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
I picked up your review request from "Nancy's Poetry Review Forum " . I'm taking on some of her reviewing for a bit, and first up on my list was your poem.

You said you want to make this poem the best it can be. Okay. There are a couple areas you might consider addressing, not just with this poem, but with any poem you write, because I think they are the types of guidelines that are generally acknowledged to be part of whatever magic it is that turns words into poetry.

Poems are not just about having something to say. We have letters, journal entries, essays and blogs for those tasks. Poems are about harnessing the inner workings of language in ways that are not directly connected to the subject, or "message," but which embellish and enhance it.

Your use of rhyme is a good example, and they are good rhymes. Nothing trite, no clichés like moon/June, though action/reaction is a little too repetitive. But explode/code, need/plead, question/misdirection are not words you always look to for rhymes and their use is effective. But face it, you could have easily made your point and gotten your message across without rhyming; the substance of your comments would remain the same. The rhymes work along a parallel track, giving your subject an organization, as you say, but one that works beneath the level of conscious logic. All this is good.

Why not apply those same organizational principles to your meter? You do an effective job of mixing four and five beat lines, but there seems to be no organization to your choices. As with rhyme, you don't need a regular rhythm to get your point across; but if you are looking for that subconscious organization, there's nothing as effective, particularly when used with a precise rhyme scheme like you've employed.

Your first stanza opens with a nice line of pentameter, followed by two four beat lines. The last can be scanned into a line of pentameter, though it's a little softer than your first line; nothing that couldn't be tightened up, however. When we read an opening stanza like this, it programs our brain and tunes us into a certain frequency, preparing us to approach and receive the poem with certain precise expectations. But then we arrive at your second stanza and we find two four beat lines, then a line of five beats, and a concluding line of four beats. It doesn't stop us from reading, but it denies us the structure that we've been lead to expect, a structure that would have worked effectively to make this a satisfyingly complete whole. Your third and fourth stanzas likewise mix four and five beat lines in what we now see are random sequences.

You need to be alert to those kinds of cues you present to your reader, because they establish, essentially, the rules you agree to follow during the course of your poem. There are rules, even if they're your own rules and you get to make them up. It's the ability of a poem to blend it's content/subject matter into an artificial structure, one external and apart yet which supports and enhances that subject, that creates something more than just a message. Those rules turn your message into a poem. We don't care what structure you choose, understand; we're on your side, and we'll follow your lead. Until that moment when we suspect you're not sure where you're going.

Another area for you to consider, as you strive to make this poem the best it can be, is the relationship between your content, and the subject you are using that content to convey. They are not the same thing at all. Unlike journalistic or essay writing, in a poem, the more specific you are, the less effective will be your result. You don't have a lot of time to get your point across in a short poem like this, and so you need to pack as much as is possible into every line.

In lines like these,

What are your words to me today
Telling me what I've done wrong in every way.

constantly leading me with misdirection.

You doubt me in my time of need

there is no distinction in the surface content of the words, and the subject of those words, and so they do that one thing, achieve that one effect, and they are used up. Further, they are conclusions handed prepackaged to the reader, and so we never get to partake of the experience that lurks underneath, experience that we might measure with our own, forcing us to become participants rather than passive observers, allowing us to draw our own conclusions. For example, these lines,

A thousand calls unanswered on a soggy night

Egg shells as land mines to judge your reaction.

bring with them a measure of ambiguity. It's not immediately clear what you mean, but there are more places for a reader to gain entry, elements that allow them to bring their own experiences to the table, a host of meanings that might be applicable. In other words, these lines create ripples along the surface of our perception and spread out beyond their simple meaning. They echo with possibilities. This is what you need to do with every line. It's a little too simplistic to say that you just need to put images into each of your lines, but it's not incorrect. Images are the hard nuggets of experience that are distilled into those bland conclusions. Leave the conclusions to your reader. Give them the experience instead and they'll know what to do.
166
166
Review of Two by Two  
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (4.5)
Sig for reviews

Strange and more than a bit horrifying. You've developed a quite distinctive voice and style. It's impressive. Once again your narrative choices require a reader to do some work in order to figure out where you're going, and even then It's not always clear. But that, too, seems to be a conscious choice, meant to offer crucial clues not only to the narrator's mindset, but also the environment in which they exist. In places your word usage seems, not clumsy, but off, and that too seems to be an intentional part of your narrator's voice. There was only one spot where I think you just goofed:

An arrow in my hand I slid it into his stomach. Julianna jolted. The other two stood their, young, twenty something, two brown-haired boys, brothers, Sam and Son.

I think you meant The other two stood there,.

I had a hard time figuring out why Julianna went crazy and tried to kill the main character. That whole sequence is actually kind of vague. You might consider clarifying the events there.

The other thing that occurred to me is that you open with a fairly long stretch of backstory. The events in the present are fairly compelling; you might consider weaving them together with the backstory, offering current action to keep the attention, feeding the backstory in as you go.

This is another imaginative piece of writing. You've got some good stuff going on. I enjoyed reading this.
167
167
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

The first sentence sets the tone of this piece:

There is emptiness inside of me where you once dwelled.

Everything that follows is an embellishment of this, a series of statements describing your feelings at having a loved one senselessly taken from you without warning. Based on some of the other pieces in your portfolio, I am assuming that this piece is biographical, and, as such, it's really outside the realm of what is properly the topic of a literary review. I will note that the statements are clearly presented and you manage to evoke the loss and emptiness that accompanies such an event. But in truth, the narrator is too completely you for there to be any objective distance from your topic. And so it requires no comment; just respect and a wish that you find eventual completion. Perhaps at that point you might turn this experience into a poem, a story or some other such artificial structure that would permit insight, commentary and objectification of what is now simply an emotional response. Someday. But not yet.
168
168
Review of My Way  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

You describe this as a poem about the storm called life. Maybe it's just me, but gosh, that feels like a awfully large topic. Broad too. In addition, the extended metaphor of the storm is pretty much a cliche, though I'll grant you that your language is highly imagistic and you avoid bland generalizations. I just think that if you lowered your sights and focused on a smaller area, your end result would be much larger.

Call it the importance of each little thing. The problem with taking on a topic like "life" is that it encompasses everything, and so you lose any details that might be significant. But life, such as it is, is simply the sum total of an infinite number of small moments, each in themselves a crystallization of the whole. It is in those small moments that true joy, pain, fear, frustration, love, loss and anything else you want to toss onto the pile assemble themselves. It is the small moments that are important, the things that we remember, that evoke a response from us.

If you find a way to capture them, honestly, you'll find that "life" takes care of itself.
169
169
Review of Crash UK  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

This poem reminds me of Chicago by Carl Sandburg in more ways than one, though eventually the comparison falters. Sandberg wanted to create an American sound with reckless, rambling lines threatening always to spin out of control, and in this poem, he found the proper subject for his tone:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

Your opening lines strike a similar stance in their balance of tone and topic as you examine London:

Oi You! Concrete crown of island nation,
Friend of style, youth, power, ambition,
Strength of a crocodile, strength of a prison,
I drove full speed in to your vision.

A major difference, of course, is that Sandburg's grand tone was an effort to capture the grandeur of his larger-than-life subject, while your concern is with London's current diminished status. So while Sandburg is literal, you are ironic. Perhaps even contemptuous.

Another difference is that you are rhyming throughout, whereas Sandburg's poem was (at the time) an experiment in free verse. Your scheme is coherent: AABB CCDD through the first two stanzas, and then, with stanza three, which is where the poem turns, you have EEEE, which, superficially at least, makes the point that this is a significant moment. But only superficially. It's actually a bit corny and pompous, if you want to know the truth, and overall, I'd say that, while you've provided decent enough words as your end rhymes, you haven't mastered the process of rhyming. At best, I'd say you survived it. The rhymes, however, have taken their toll.

Here's the test: would you have chosen the same overall sound and sense for your lines had you not been trying to make them rhyme? Mastery of any form requires that you incorporate it into what you would have said anyway, as if, upon completion, you just happened to note, "Oh wow, look at this—everything rhymes!" Or falls into perfect iambic pentameter, or conforms to any of dozens of structural forms. But you need to own the form, dominate it, push it around and make it do what you want. Any time you come up with lines that exist simply to fit one requirement or other, the form is dominating you. And your writing suffers as a result.

I'd be interested in seeing what you'd some up with if you took the kind of freewheeling approach that Sandburg took in his poem. Your ideas seem like they want to break out of the boundaries of your rhymed lines, where each contains a single thought, one per line, and then it's on to the next. This stanza, for instance:

But now you shudder as the whole world shakes,
Production changes, the small man quakes,
Your big bold players all raised the stakes,
On weak foundations and now it breaks.

feels to me like it would be better served with lines like these, from Chicago:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

It's interesting to note how fresh these 90 year old lines still sound. Likewise how light they manage to feel, despite their length. I think you have thoughts about your city that are equally valid and fresh. Find the form that allows their clearest expression.
170
170
Review by edgework
Rated: 18+ | (4.0)
Sig for reviews

Bad writing can't hide for more than two or three paragraphs. It might fool you through a descriptive passage here, a couple of lines of dialogue there. But eventually, sooner rather than later, its reach will exceed its grasp, it will do things we don't expect and we'll quickly realize that the confusion is not a function of growing complexity, but of ineptitude. At that point we can safely move on to the next piece, secure in the knowledge that we aren't missing anything we'll regret passing up.

Another type of bad writing can hang in there a good deal longer, because it's actually written well and can sound great. It's only as the full dimensions of its structure reveal themselves that we realize crucial elements are missing, things that all the well-turned phrases can't make up for.

Then there are pieces like this one. I've read it three times, and I think I have a fairly complete sense of what it's trying to accomplish, but the only thing I can say for certain is that it definitely does not belong in the first group. I've pondered long and hard trying to decide if it belongs in the second group; perhaps my inability to come to a conclusion is itself an indication that it does not. If a piece is missing crucial parts it's going to be pretty unambiguous about it, after all. The writing here is strong, sufficiently so that when I encounter a passage like this:

She feels a buzz against her thigh and nearly beats whatever stinging beast is in there, but just grabs her phone instead. Home, it says as it buzzes and stings, but she isn’t there and it isn’t here. She looks up to me, swims for a moment, and shows me the screen.

which would, under any other circumstances, stick out as a glaring case of misplaced point of view, with the first-person narrator taking an unauthorized walk through her companion's thoughts, I'm not at all certain it's wrong; it's certainly not accidental. In fact, despite the fact that I can't state anything about the first half of the story with absolute certainty, I'm willing to grant that any confusion may be my problem. But maybe not. Upon reflection, I think I've decided that this is a really strong piece of innovative writing hidden inside a needlessly complicated structure. Clarity seems to have been traded for self-indulgent obscurity... but, for all that, she might just have pulled it off anyway.

The surface is fairly straightforward: a young woman is preparing herself to visit her father tomorrow; he is brain-dead and alive only through life-support. It seems that a decision has been made to pull the plug, and she is working her way through the myriad recollections and impressions that ramble around in her head as she tries to sort out all of it. The story opens in a restaurant with a conversation between the first-person narrator and the young woman in question. It's an annoying scene, both for the aforementioned looseness with the point of view, but also because we soon suspect that nothing is developing out of it.

Notice that I use a lot of phrases like we suspect, it seems, etc. This is a function of what would appear to be an intentional stylistic effect (there, I did it again), keeping the real world steadily out of focus, giving us instead an impressionist montage of reactions to and reflections upon that outer reality. Our initial annoyance at this conversation quickly turns to the suspicion that there may be no dialogue taking place at all. In fact, by the end of the story, we have good reason to beieve that the first person narrator that opened the story, and the young woman in question are in fact the same person.

As she thinks ahead to what she will face the next day, she also thinks of her family's past, one that seems to be somewhat dysfunctional. But, of course, the details aren't really the point; they all remain slightly off stage as we cast about for something on which to focus, a continually thwarted effort. It's all internal. This means nothing actually happens within the frame of the story. The past is contemplated, the upcoming events are projected, but she never leaves the restaurant. And so we are denied the dramatic tension that would be generated by granting us direct access to the tense personal drama about to unfold. Instead, with everything filtered through the thought processes in her head, the story relies solely on the power of the writing for any tension and interest that we might experience. Is it enough? Possibly. Certainly the second half pulls its weight. The opening section, while interesting, comes off as simply a puzzle to be solved, a stylistic trick to which we give our attention because the writing seems to warrant it and we're reasonably assured that it's not going to be a dead end excursion. As to whether or not the payoff is worth the effort, I think probably not.

Overall, while the style and narrative choices would appear to justify themselves, there is still the question "Does it work?" That would depend on who the author sees as her natural audience. This would probably be well received in a fiction workshop where exploring alternative narrative processes are not only expected but pretty much the point. An informed reader willing to spend the time will certainly come away with an intellectual payoff. But no one's going to get slugged in the gut by this, no one will be compelled to stay up past their bedtime, unable to put it down until they see how it's going to end. And, while it's useful as a short story, and entire novel of such abstraction would be a bit of a heavy slog.

Stories like this raise all manner of questions regarding the relationship between writer and audience, between surface content and the real-world analogues feeding that content, and the role and purpose of stories in the first place. This writier leaves plenty of clues regarding the kind of plot that could have been fashioned out of these elements, a plot she intentionally avoided. As a statement of the position she takes in the midst of these issues, it serves effectively. However, as a reader, I confess I wouldn't have minded being taken on the actual journey, been granted the opportunity to experience her confrontation with her father in the present, and the past which that confrontation evokes. That would have been a compelling read and it might have actually slugged me in the gut.

I've no doubt the author would be up to the technical requirements. The emotional payoff would certainly have been worth it. But in its present form, the intellectual payoff is certainly not without value.
171
171
Review of Hidden Things  
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.5)
Sig for reviews

You write well and I think you have some good things started here. However, with some judicious editing you can make this a much more effective opening segment. Also, you seem to be sending mixed messages, at least at one point.

You need to make sure you keep attitudes and perspectives straight. In addition to the way each of your characters relates to the others, there is also the stance your story takes regarding the proceedings. You are showing us a main character who is enduring an uncommon level of emotional and psychological cruelty, and our natural reaction will be to empathize with her situation. Her name is Hope, yet her father and husband insist on calling her Dumbo and berating her every chance they get. But in this paragraph—

"Mine of useless information is our Dumbo," mumbled Charlie, Dumbo's Father. Dumbo said nothing but thought lots. Why can't the pair of them shut up about my weight. Or better still, just shut up altogether. They've never got anything nice to say. Absently she patted the dog that dozed happily against her side. At least Popup never said anything horrible to her.

—you and the story itself suddenly inflict the same ridicule on her that her father and husband throw at her. Can't do that. If "Dumbo" is a signal that she's being minimized by one or more characters, your story has to keep a sharp focus on her real identity, the one that you want to communicate to your readers.

I don't have a whole lot else to complain about, at least regarding the writing itself. Your dialogue is clean and believable and your pace the action well. I'm not sure yet about basic characterization: Hope comes off as way too subservient (though with an undercurrent of rage and resentment that rings true) and Dad and Hubby are a bit too simplistic. I suppose that in the real world there are jackasses like them, far more than should be permitted to walk the streets, actually, but they tend to be awfully boring and one-dimensional. All cruelty and no care or concern means you don't really have a lot to work with in terms of using your characters as a driving force behind your plot. The same problem suggests itself with Hope: she's so meek one can only feel sorry for her. But what we really want is to cheer for her. We want to see her win. Of course, when the adversary is so wholly vile, the only question available is why she hasn't already taken a lead pipe and caved in their skulls while they're sleeping. Bringing out multiple facets of your characters' personalities would offer you much more in the way of believable interactions. (And then you wouldn't have to settle for interior monologue, as in the above quoted passage. All those feelings could actually come out in three-dimensional interactions between three dimensional characters. Once that happens, you have to just get out of the way, because they'll take the story where they want).

You make an effort to show another side to her father, and to provide a context for the way he is now when you talk of their relationship before her mother's death. In fact, it is the believability and emotional impact you bring to that whole passage that tells me you have some good chops at your disposal. Use them to craft characters who aren't just one-trick ponies. Good characters have conflicting natures, they don't always do what we expect, they can be awful when we expect them to be decent and they can surprise us with tenderness when we've decided they have not one spec of humanity in them. But actually, the problem may not be in the way you've imagined your characters at all. It might just be structural.

I think the single most important thing you can do with these two chapters is condense them into one. There is a lot that can be removed without breaking the narrative, and then you would end up with a singe opening chapter that establishes relationships in the present, introduces complicating characters, offers enough backstory to orient us in this metaphysical universe, and ends with the first major plot point. And, you would be forced to present your characters' essential natures much more economically, showing us the same traits but with fewer scenes. The problem i had reading these two chapters is that Dad and Hubby are relentlessly one way, Hope is relentlessly another way, and they just keep on being that way. How many times do we need to hear her husband call her Dumbo, before we get the point? Once, and we've got it. Yet the whole first chapter seems to be an unending portrayal of a family's disfunction. One scene would do the job. Then, you'd get to concentrate on the actual plot, rather than simply making us feel sorry for Hope. That's a situation, a condition of her existence, and, if all goes well with your plot, it will be the thing that motivates her to action. But her relationships with her father and husband are not in themselves story or plot.

Thing is, you do have a sense of your plot and you've done just enough to make a reader want to see where things go. So make that story the point, trust your characters to interact honestly, which will tell us all that we need to know, and don't linger once you've accomplished the task at hand. You have a story to tell, and you need to get on with it.

I think your readers will follow along when you do.
172
172
Review of Who Knows?  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

Just when I thought you were giving me some kind of gooey, flaccid jellyfish of a poem, all cliche and no content, you surprised me. I think there are some really banal things going on here, but, at the same time, you have sparkles that jump out and suggest a genuine poetic sensibility at work.

You need to read a lot more, tons and tons of stuff, everyone you find, whether you like them or not, until you learn why poets who are taken seriously wouldn't try to get away with a line like

the unfathomed lengths of loneliness

which is a puffed up piece of nothing with pretensions to mediocrity. You need to recognize wander these wonders and some eternal entity as the poetic equivalent of puns, momentarily interesting but lasting for the time it takes to read them, and no longer.

You also need to see why stars in almost any context are a cliche, but stars and nebulae (which is the correct plural form) has something of interest to offer. The astronaut reference likewise is interesting and causes one to sit up and take notice. The references to relativity in the stanza that follows should be sharpened and clarified, drawing on the same specificity and clarity as nebula and astronaut. Wherever you drop nuggets of real experience into your lines, we sit up and pay attention. But there are too many short cuts, too much laziness. An interesting line like

Oh! Sweet molecules, essences of me

is followed by a lazy line like

This is the far-flung, dimming lights of some kind of life

although the essences phrase could be sharper, and the dimming lights could anchor a strong line if you'd let one gather around them.

And then, there's the final stanza, one that, by all rights, should be dismissed as another cliche. Except that it's not, and the reason that it's not is that it works. It has music, it breaks out of the narrow confines of its own content without trying too hard, but that's not really why it works. It works because it's well written and sometimes you can't come any closer to an explanation than that, but it shows that you have solid poems in you.

Work to uncover them.
173
173
Review of A Lilac Dream  
Review by edgework
Rated: E | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

In your review request you state "I hope you could help me with my writing." I don't know how much help I can offer, but I might be able to suggest a couple of directions for you to pursue as you figure out your own path.

Let me say right up front that you have good instincts. You're young and you have a world of development ahead of you, but unlike so many your age (and many older, who should know better), you avoid bland, generic cliches. You are thinking in images, there are things happening in your poems out there in the real world instead of just bouncing off the walls of some nebulous emotional space within. The more you offer your reader in the way of hard nuggets of experience, the more you will invite them to blend your words with their own experience and become participants rather than passive observers. For example, in these lines:

That a man spoon and his wife fork,
share the moment's romantic solitude.
Though I come nearer to steal a glance,
the cascading moonlight in the rivers dance.
Thought with shame, I am to admit
How foul my intentions had been.

you have some fairly crisp images in the first four lines. In the last two, however, you choose to simply tell us the interpretation, rather than presenting the moment in such a way that we will be able to form our own conclusions. That your readers' conclusion might be different than your own is part of the process of any work of art. You pour as much honesty and authenticity into it as you can, and then you are done. It stands or falls on its own and you have no control over how it will be received or interpreted. Once you recognize that your job as a poet is not to try to control your readers' experience, you will then be able to concentrate on the real work at hand, which is to create a structure of language, one that borrows from life and experience, but which exists not to tell a story or argue a position, but to show us what language can do when it's set free to dance.

I sense that you are pushing in this direction aready. Your "Idiot Cow," doesn't make any immediate sense, at least not in the way we would want from a piece of prose—an essay or story. I think you need to just go ahead and give yourself permission to stop making sense, or, at least, stop trying to turn out poems that seem stuck in a prose groove. Poems can be about things, of course, but the relationship between language and content is reversed from what it is in prose. In poetry, content and linguistic structures drive the subject and often one finds that meaning comes not from the surface meaning of the words, but from the way that they are arranged and the kinds of juxtapositions that are presented.

If there's one bit of advice I could offer that I am certain would never fail you, it would be to read more poetry. Read lots of it. I get the feeling that you've read some, but not enough of the right kind. There's a bit too much reliance on moonlight, meadows, fluttering wings and, in general, a fantasy world that seems to have been created to lend a profundity to your perceptions. These two lines open another poem that you also linked in your review request:

I rest upon these sunken clouds,
as I gaze upon the arena of gods,

Really? I don't begrudge you the fantasy aspect, but it feels throughout like you're using it as a substitute, as though channeling your own experience wouldn't be good enough. That's the kind of insight that wide exposure to a variety of poets and styles would give you: that your own experience is the only thing worth channeling. Okay, you're only fifteen; by definition you don't have a vast storehouse of experience to draw upon, not like an old fart like myself. So? Write what you know, and use what you know honestly. You have sufficient craft to turn out relevant pieces right now. What you don't have is trust in your own voice. Hence the artificial voice and the fantasy world that you've manufactured.

You want to get a sense of what poetry sounds like when the poet decides not to be concerned with linear subjects and prosaic arguments? Check out http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Home.htm.

You like poems that actually can be understood? That aren't afraid to be about something? Try http://www.strongverse.org/.

Google "Literary Magazines" and spend the next year working through the hits.

It's not as important who you read at this point, but that you read. Don't worry about coming up with something original. You have to discover how you want to say things before you can settle on what you want to say. Don't worry about who you should choose as influences, either. Let everyone influence you. Copy them all. At this point you're doing finger exercises to develop your instincts. Save the profundity for later. Or, better yet, rethink what a poem should do, so you can avoid the trap of trying to be "significant." That's a determination that will come later, from others. Or it won't. Either way you'll have no control over it.

So work on your craft. Learn more about scansion. Learn to recognize lines that scan into strong metrical feet, and train your ear to recognize why they sound better. Your words already have a nice rhythm to them, but attention to the details would produce a much more satisfying result. And be okay about being ignored. Despite the vast number of outlets for poetry these days on the web and in literary magazines, the number of aspiring poets is greater by a couple orders of magnitude. Statistics predicts you'll get lost in the shuffe whatever you do. So do anything and everything you can to stand out. When you submit for pubication, you'll eventually get read, by someone, but if you can't demonstrate from the first line that you've done the necessary homework to learn the field they won't linger over you.

I'll be interested in seeing how you develop.
174
174
Review by edgework
Rated: 13+ | (3.0)
Sig for reviews

You dropped your review request in my forum about three weeks ago. Sorry for taking so long to get to it. I'm going to start working through my backlog (once again) with this chapter of yours. I've also read Chapter Two and will treat them both together, as my comments relate not to specific points along the path, but to the way you are approaching your characters and the story you are weaving around them.

Some folks write little verses and poems for fun and play; some even write a short story or two for the sheer pleasure of the writing, with no real intentions of taking them anywhere. I'd say it's safe to assume, however, that people don't turn out multiple chapters of a novel just for the heck of it. So I'm going to assume you have aspirations for this, which is to say, publishing it. I'm giving it a 3.0 which, if you've read the intro to my site, suggests that you still have work ahead of you if your goal is to appeal to an editor. I could be wrong, of courser; you have an engaging style, you handle dialogue, action and description with a bit more flair than what's called for to simply be functional. But I think you are making some serious omissions at the outset, in the way you imagine your characters and what it is you see them doing, omissions that will most likely prevent you from getting the kind of reading you want.

I think you've got a story cooking here, but I made it to the end of chapter two and still have no idea what it might be. Chapter Three might be a brilliant work of mesmerizing genius, but if you can't engage your reader by the end of the second chapter to the extent that they at least have a sense of what's driving the main character, what she wants and what's in her way, no one's going to hang in long enough to get to the good stuff. And that's the problem. You need the "good stuff" from the first paragraph. Which is to say, we need to know exactly what direction your story is taking at the outset. We don't need to know everything, of course; part of the fun is uncovering the direction. But unless each new thing we encounter—whether a conversation, a description, an activity or an internal impression—feeds directly back into that main stream of your narrative arc, there will be ho direction for us to uncover. Without that structural necessity, we'll quickly come to the realization that information that comes to us may not mean much. And then you will lose us. For me, that point came with the conclusion of the second chapter. For an editor with hundreds of query letters and hopeful submissions to wade through, I think that moment would have come much earlier.

I referred earlier to the idea of a narrative arc. That's the kind of broad concept that can mean pretty much whatever you need it to mean in the moment, but when it is missing, the lack ia immediately apparent. Basically, it means that a story, chapter, scene, even a paragraph, begins at one point, moves through a particular terrain, and arrives at a different place, whether geographic, psychological, emotional or even spiritual. Mostly it's about problems and solving them, conflicts and avoid or triumphing over them, or insight gained. This last needn't be restricted to your characters. Your reader can participate in this arc as they slowly gain a clearer perception of what's going on and what's at stake. But however it's crafted, it provides direction and an energy field that propels your characters and causes plots to gather around them.

You've neglected to do this. I don't doubt that Crystal has desires, goals, issues to be confronted, obstacles to be overcome and adversaries to out-maneuver; but you've neglected to put any of it in your text. Instead, you nibble at the idea of problems, but those problems aren't at the core of how you envision her, and so they never really take shape as plot points, and there's nothing, really, for her to do, other than to stumble around bumping into life as it randomly comes at her.

You have a decent idea at the beginning—Crystal is persuaded by her friend, June, to take a bite of the forbidden fruit, as it were, and clearly, this presents a reach for her, a willingness to step outside of her carefully defined boundaries, and brings with it the kind of risk such behavior threatens. Ah... but WHEW, everything works out all right. Rule #1: things that work out all right aren't plots. Plots are things that don't work out, and have to be dealt with. She gets separated from June, gets accosted by a drunk who clearly has nefarious designs on her person. Wow, she might really be in trouble. But no, a white knight, albeit masked, appears out of nowhere and dispatches the assailant. Meanwhile she's in the midst of an environment that is utterly alien and completely outside her experience, yet she remains totally apart from her surroundings, and so does your story. You suggest that she takes June up on her invitation initially to spite her fiance, but then she makes certain that she remains untouched, both physically and emotionally.

Okay... an argument can be made that that is just her nature. But then, why write about her? Someone who dabbles with the idea of risky behavior, but changes her mind when things get rough and tough might be prudent and sensible, but they're not the kind of character who presents opportunities to write about. As you've discovered. Meanwhile, the really interesting character, June, vanishes almost immediately and while we'd clearly have preferred to follow her wherever her lusty, adventurous passion took her, we only get to sample the aftermath: a hoarse voice and an obvious hangover.

Meanwhile, Crystal encounters the mysterious stranger again, now sans mask, and, hey, maybe some sparks will fly now. But no. He offers her a ride home, she accepts, and they part company. No sparks. No tension, other than the internal monologue running through her head, which is nothing more than you, the author, stepping in and doing your characters' work for them, since you've neglected to engineer real tension into their actual lives. Note this passage, as he arrives at her destination after transporting her back to her home:

“Did I scare you?” he asked.

Yes, she thought. “No,” she said.

“Ready?”

“Uh huh.”

Following her directions, he rode away from the Place de Negres at a gallop, but when they reached the Garden District he eased the horse into a trot. When they finally reached the gates of Oak Alley and he handed her down off the horse, she felt relieved to not have to be so close to the handsome stranger. The feel of his chest beneath her hands seemed seared to her fingers, even with coat and shirt covering his bare skin from her own flesh. She’d felt too close for comfort riding with him, but she also felt an unsettling need to be next to him again. For a moment she wondered if he was feeling the same things, then, realizing she was staring, she quickly broke the silence that lengthened between them.

“Thank you very much, for everything; I don’t know what I would have done without you.” She smiled warmly at him, hoping he would see how grateful she was.

“No problem,” he said, nonchalant.

An awkward silence again filled the air.

Note her rich internal life, full of passion, issues, confusion and genuine emotional responses. Note the boring, bland encounter she has with him in the real world. Thinking about passion is a poor substitute for actual passion, both for your characters and your readers. In addition, if you engineer all that internal monologue into your character's actual personna, giving her real things to say that reflect how she's actually feeling, you begin to delegate the responsibility of telling the reader what they need to know away from your authorial intrusions (which is what such internal monologues always amount to) to real, three-dimensional interactions between believable characters. But that would mean letting her contradictions out of their cage. That's the romance formula, and while I'm not certain that your intent is to produce an historical romance according to the strict definition of the genre, one convention that always works is tension, sexual and otherwise, between the hero and the heroine. Conflict. Usually it's a silly conflict resulting from mere misunderstands that could be reconciled with a real conversation, but that's because most romance writers don't know how to write. You do, so you don't get to use that excuse.

Chapter two embodies all that is missing in your approach. You start with an endlessly long dream, which, by definition, means nothing is happening except, once again, in Crystal's rich internal world. Dreams and flashbacks are guaranteed ways to suck the life out of your story since whatever is at stake in the real-time present action is put on hold while you get the supplemental material out of the way. It's a serious red flag for you that the most passionate encounter in your first two chapters is the dream, and it points the way to how you need to reconsider your approach. There is undeniable tension in your dream sequence, but what's needed is a situation in the real world that packs that same punch. Once the dream is over, we get paragraph after paragraph of the sisters twittering about dresses and the upcoming ball, which may, or may not, be significant: by this time we're not sure that things that happen have any relevance other than that they are things that happen. Can't do that to your story, or your readers. Everything that happens needs to be there for a purpose, needs to further your plot and clarify who your characters are by showing them in the process of dealing with the problems that arise.

First, however, you need to figure out what those problems are; then you need to put them at the center of the story. That way, your characters will have something to do that readers will find engaging. Nothing captures a reader's attention like a character struggling to solve a problem.
175
175
Review by edgework
Rated: ASR | (2.5)
Sig for reviews

You play well with words. Some people never quite get past the idea that words are meant to carry information, and as long as they make that information clear, they've done their job. There's a word for that type of writing. It's called "journalism," and when the information is crucial, or the point, it serves well.

You, on the other hand, have a clear appreciation for some of the other things that words are able to do, apart from carrying a message. They can mysteriously group themselves into a structure that suggests order, for reasons that have nothing to do with the content. They can fall into repeating rhythms, and let the sounds fall into rhymes, both of which are examples of language playing its own games with us, and they can be quite entertaining games to watch, and to participate in.

You have a good sense of the craft of this particular style of poetry; one gets the feeling that you could crank out stanzas like this all night long. Unfortunately, your efforts are pretty much wasted on emotional journalism. The rhyme and meter are clever embellishments, but it is the emotional statements that are the point of the piece, and your first priority seems to be to give them voice.

Don't get me wrong; I pass no judgment on the feelings expressed, nor on your use of poetry to perhaps objectify those feelngs and work through them. But the majority of your lines are generalizations of feelings, summaries of some experience or other, experiences that are beyond our ability to appreciate since you haven't put them in the piece. Your few images are cliches in themselves, and more so in the way that they are used. For example,

The moon is full and glowing
as I gaze up at the sky.
The pain you've caused seems endless.
Now I sit here wondering why?

Even if your moon and sky images had been interesting, they have no bearing on the rest of the stanza. They, like the sunset you stare off into in your opening line, seem chosen because of some vague sense that in a poem of unrequited or failed love, there needs to be a pause to reflect on the heavens. Why? I couldn't say, and I doubt you could either.

Elsewhere you abandon imagery altogether, simply feeding us conclusions.

I need to let the feelings go
and once again be me.
This hole inside will slowly fill
and I will be set free.


This is the kind of conclusion that a reader might intuit from lines that captured an experience and allowed them to share it. In that event, the reader's interpretation would become part of the experience of the poem, causing them to draw upon their own memories and perspectives. Here, you simple tell us, in flat language, how you feel. Such feelings might initiate a poem, might even provide it's driving energy. But in themselves, stated outright, they are not the poem.

You have a decent amount of craft at your disposal. I'd love to see you use it to create language that surprises, that captures images and experiences, rather than simply ruminating on the aftermath of those experiences. But that means you will need to stop relying on those easy feelings and ideas that first pop into your head. There's a reason they're cliches: they've been popping into heads for eons. If the sun and the moon (at least you left out the stars) ever had any life or capability to surprise, it was drained long ago. Don't be so easy on yourself. Work up a sweat, and come up with some lines that we haven't heard before. We'll notice.
255 Reviews · *Magnify*
Page of 11 · 25 per page   < >
Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/profile/reviews/edgework/sort_by/r.review_creation_time DESC/page/7