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What Caught My Eye

I read the first 4 lines. I like to review newbies... I love free verse and spoken word and rap, so those lines were all it took.

Favorite Aspects

The entire poem down to "NYC I swear". Man that flow is on point... the meaning is clear. It's unique enough in word choice and meaning to be something of interest.

Hook
In my reviews, I like to focus a bit on the opening line(s) of a poem. Sometimes, people forget that a good hook is as important for a poem as it is for a story. It might be more important, in fact. Given the length of a poem, the intro (that hook) is a considerable percentage of the piece as a whole. It needs to be both functional and interesting to serve its purposes.

In this case, I can honestly say that the opening hooked me. There is no reason to capitalize "world" or "ground". Personally, I find that awkward. The whole... capitalize important words thing is super archaic, and this isn't an archaic poetry style. They don't match.

That said, the first two lines set this up as a rhyme-filled poem bordering on cheesy. I'd line break differently.

The world is round or
flat as ground?

That works much better in my view, and the flow is still super on point.

Language / Word Choice

After "NYC I swear", the poem feels like it loses focus and also falls into straight cliche territory. First, you already used "connected" and "interlaced" so the "connects" bit is repetitive and ineffective. Rolling tears and crystal clear tears and... meh. I've read all of that a billion times. It's at best a bit boring. Definitely not emotive. I'd 100% revise from "Connects everywhere" clear through "what's about" (which is grammatically awkward to the point where I don't know what you mean to say).

After that, it's really solid again. Basically, you just have 5 really bummer lines in here that drag the piece down. It's a shame, especially since it looks like it's supposed to be the climactic/emotional part. Not working as well as it should.

Maybe instead of tears and whatnot, make it something related to the city. Something that you feel makes it "dark" today. Use a better image than just... a crying anonymous face.

Flow / Rhythm

The flow is good. Great even in places.

One Thing to Work On?
What one thing will make the biggest difference for this piece?

Rewrite the 5 lines that are cliche/ineffective/make no sense ("what's about" ). The rest is nice.

Oh, and yeah... line breaks for the intro. Still think that would be better than setting the poem up to be something it isn't (i.e. an end-line rhyming poem).

Effect

I would definitely call this poem "good" except for the part in the middle that doesn't work and sorta... feels like a totally different poem. So, as-is, this is a bit above average for me. If you decide to revise, I'd be interested in seeing what you did with it.






My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .