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What Caught My Eye

This popped up in Read & Review (which is a great way to find interesting things to read and earn some gift points, by the way). I read the first few lines and figured... cute kid's poem. If this hadn't been in the children's genre, I probably would have cruised past it. It definitely sounds like a poem for children.

Favorite Aspects

The tone is on point for the genre and intended audience. It's cute and... sorta random. Much like children usually are. Beets? Really?

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.

There is a fair bit of unneeded fluff in the first stanza that sorta... hinders the sing-songy flow of a children's poem:

Kai's handsome smile
always lasts awhile
and brightens my day.
It never goes away!

Read this out loud... and read yours out loud. When sounds smoother? This is still your words except for one: I changed beautiful to handsome, not because of gender at all... JUST because "beautiful" is a mouthful and "handsome" is easier to say. You could use "lovely" or any number of shorter words too.

Language / Word Choice

There are some moments here that... make no sense and are just for the rhyme.

Kai's smiles always lasts a while
because it's meant to bring out the best in us
so lets not cuss.

This in particular is rough... why would anyone cuss at a kid for smiling? It rhymes. That's its only reason for being I think. So... I'd rewrite a bit. PLUS the flow here is some of the roughest in the poem. To be honest, I think you could probably cut the whole stanza. Or just keep the new idea. Something like:

Kai's smile brings out the best
in everyone he's ever met

It's a slant rhyme, but it gives you an idea of what would be more effective... just cut it down and smooth it out. Make the rhyme make organic sense.

Flow / Rhythm

The flow is uneven in places. The second stanza is the best example. The second line is a good beat off the first.

And the cats say, "What a magical child!
He can smile for miles and miles!"

That would fix the flow. Oh, and I added the dialogue tags. It's perfectly fine to use dialogue in a poem just like in a story. It gives the full effect of the cats talking too.

Anyway, this is just one area where the flow is off. If you set it aside for a few months and then read it out loud, you'll hear it.

Imagery

Some of this is light on imagery, but you make up for it in the types of images kids would latch onto... like spitting broccoli.

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

Fixing the flow would make the biggest difference. You hit the mark in places and then lose it again. Some of it could be remedied simply by revising lines to make them shorter.

Effect

This is cute. I'm sure it made Kai happy. It's clearly a rough draft (or roughly typed up for the site), since it's missing punctuation, has subject/predicate disagreements, and could use a bit of revision in general. That's the reason for the rating-- most of the content is super cute. A basic edit for grammar could help a bit, but a revision for flow would be ideal. I'm sure it brought a smile to at least one person's face though!





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