review of tracy, amber, rhiannon, and kenneth

Tracy Madrid

Liquid Soul

Tracy begins writing her opinions on how love should be expressed and cherished, moving on to dense visual descriptions of the intensity of how love feels, and finishes with personal touches (“we are love”) as a nod to her own experience. Most of the poem is descriptive, but I think the strongest part is in the end where we see how love has influenced Tracy and she shares personal experience with us. In revision I’d consider “We are coin; two sides of the same thing;/ We are balanced; we are heaven and hell;/Light and dark; black and white;” This meter isn’t echoed elsewhere in the poem. Tracy writes her own wonderful descriptions “the only material holding the viscera/is the skin” and if the repetition is desired, consider using her own words rather than ready-made descriptions of love.

Amber Schiecher

She sits in stillness

I believe we are watching a woman who is considering leaving her husband, he is definitely coming home late, and this is a difficult time. I like the formatting of the poem, it reads easily and has an effortless rhythm, short lines compliment longer ones, the visual form of it is pleasing as well. Using the line “beaten, battered, and bruised” to show how she is a strong woman is effective. Concluding with “and breaks” doesn’t contradict this to me, rather, we feel compassion for this woman. I can envision my mother or a friend or myself in this situation. My only question leaving the poem regards the boy – is this her son? Their son? Why is what he said “unintelligent”? Is he scared for his mother? Does he understand what is going on? … anything to indicate where he is in all this, or consider if he needs to be mentioned at all?

Rhiannon Feehly

The Mystery of the Season

A nice sum up of the changing of the seasons in rhyming couplets. I think it’s cute, but if you are going to use this tactic then the lines should have consistent rhythm. I had to read through it a few times, each time changing the accent in a line or two before I felt I was reading like it was meant to be, and a reader not reading this for class may not have that patience for an author. It seemed like more than a few couplets had an extra syllable in their lines which jarred the tempo, and could be solved with taking out inessential words (and,the for example) Balance in each couplet would make this piece more readable.

Kenneth Seivers

A Moment N Ur Eyes

I grasp that this is basically a love poem. I find the U, R, 2 etc distracting to the point that I cannot listen to the words and take in the intent. I also found that individual lines rarely relate to the lines preceding and following, making it like jumping from paragraph to paragraph with no transition in the text. I enjoyed that he included what I will call a “chorus”… the few lines that appeared together more than once, and with repetition I felt they accrued significance. My favorite line(s) were the final lines, I can’t tell if they relate to the context of the piece, but are a strong string of words.