Feedback for author

Audrey,

Thank you for sharing this brilliant work with me. I have left comments in the document using Word’s “track changes” feature. If you would like to show or hide these suggestions, click on the lines to the left of the page. Of course, anything I’ve changed or commented on is only a suggestion. You are the artist and you know best! Some of my general thoughts are as follows:

Regarding Book Structure

Some of my edits included:

-          Inserting/ formatting titles

-          Using page breaks to separate each poem

-          Inserting a table of contents (that you can easily change)

-          Adding page numbers

Without the titles formatted to stand out, it became hard for me to know where the poems began and ended. However, if this is the reading style that you would like this book to have, then we can easily put the poems back to how they were without the titles.

In terms of the sections, “Tragedy,” “Love,” etc., I thought these worked very well. The breakdown helps the reader keep following your trajectory, and it makes the book have almost a narrative arc. There were only a couple of poems that I felt didn’t fit completely in their section, and these poems include [redacted] and [redacted].

However, I wonder if there is any way to make your sections more specific. I feel like I’ve read a lot of books with similar section titles, and yours could stand out from those books if you made these titles a little more interesting. For example, instead of calling the first section “Tragedy,” maybe it could be a very specific phrase or moment that is tragic. Or maybe name the root of the pain that inspired this section.

Every section flowed great to me, and the sections transitioned to each other very smoothly. I like that the “Strength” section contains just the one, powerful poem. (Unless you plan to add more. But it worked for me)

Regarding Poem Form

I adore the way you make short poems that contain lots of depth. However, I noticed that many of the poems look the same on the page. Most all of them have short lines with spaces between each line and no stanza breaks or punctuation (aside from question marks and ellipses). I think it would be nice to see some variation in these. I left some comments on poems where I thought you could consider playing with the way they look on the page.

Additionally, all of the poems have the first word of each line capitalized. There is nothing wrong with this, but I wanted to bring it to your attention in case that was something that Microsoft Word did without your knowledge.

Regarding Book Content

As I mentioned, the poems fit well into their respective sections to me. However, some of the poems seemed to flow so well into each other that they didn’t feel like different poems at all. I marked some of the places where I felt you might combine certain pieces into one.

Finally, I commented on places where I thought you could tighten the language to make certain lines flow more seamlessly. For example, in “[redacted]” the last line feels a bit wordy. Cut down, it could be a punchier ending for the poem.

Again, thanks so much for trusting me with this work. Let me know if you have any questions!

With light,

Jae