he turned to glass

I know a critique should avoid being biased, but let me start it by saying that I absolutely love the originality of this poem. Honestly, at first, I was thinking... ''wow, another poet writing about growing up and heart-breaks ya da da,'' but I realised as the poem developed, you really twisted my perspective of romantic teenage poems.

I noticed there was no rhyme in this poem, but that is completely fine - in this case, it works well because your poem takes the form of a narrative, as if it was in the format of a speech. I'm not sure whether it's just a pet peeve I have, but I really do advise you refrain from writing long lines for your stanza, it seems to lose the beat of the poem regardless of whether rhyme is present.

For example:
The second thing to go was his face.
He would lean his head on my shoulder -
Watching movies on the couch.
He would kiss me in the car before
I dashed up the drive way knowing it was
Past my curfew.
He'd smile when I told him how sexy he was,
jokingly telling me to shut up.

I would laugh.

With having separate lines, you would have to change the tenses in order for them to make sense, but it's just a suggestion and you don't necessarily have to follow it.

In order to make it more clear, perhaps you could have swayed towards a certain thought, for example, since you were implying how disappointed you were with him, you could have incorporated hyperboles or even more emotive language to emphasise your stance as the poet.

I like how you began your poem, because by referring to yourself as any other teenager, the reader is able to relate to you automatically and by doing that, you have already captured their attention.

Chopping up the parts into three parts: hands, face and heart proved to be effective. I honestly thought you were going to start talking about his feet, torso, etc so I did think of closing the page. Structurally placing the heart as the last thing to be talked about was smart because the heart is associated with emotions, feelings, thoughts, opinions... and it made a huge impact towards the ending.

You built up the tension by bringing up the past and referring it back to the present - I thought that was really good. One of the techniques I could see was the repetition you used for the 3rd last stanza, ''opening, closing, opening, closing'' which projected a literal image into the readers mind.

Apart from that, I'm not so sure where else you used poetic techniques, I haven't been able to accurately mark the amount of stars based on your technique...therefore I will rate your technique based on repetition, prosaic language, poetic language and the building of tension in the poem. Perhaps you could enlighten me on where you used certain techniques, as I would appreciate that.

You could pay attention to punctuation as it truly does generate a different impact with certain types of punctuation. Ellipses would hint hesitation, a lack of punctuation (enjambment) would mean that the story goes on with a flow, a full stop indicates the end/break of your point which if used effectively could imply that there is no more left for the protagonist in the poem to salvage.



I hope you don't feel offended by this critique, I truly do enjoy this poem - especially for it's originality, but there are just a few things you could touch up on and if you did that, you would be even more amazing than you already are. Also, I marked you 4/5 based on Vision because I felt your intentions/feelings could have been put across more evidently. <img src="e.deviantart.net/emoticons/b/b…" width="15" height="15" alt="" title=" (Big Grin)"/> There is most certainly more to be commented on, but that is all I can think of at the moment. Thank you!