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Hi Gina, back again for the galazy review event!
This poem is so soft compared to the last few I've read.
The way you start matched with the title of Vulnerability put me in a calm atmosphere before I even began reading. I love these little vignettes and how they all represent a different moment of vulnerability. I can't stop talking about it, but your usage of time is so seamless. I always feel like I move so easily from one thing to the next, like you're taking the audience along on a journey. It's so amazing!!
And they are again mundane things, just happenings, until you get to the last stanza, where everything feels weighted. I get the impression of building up in this poem. Like when I read it back the second time all the seemingly "meaningless" daily occurences mean more because they are what makes up a life. I hope that makes sense??
I just love it!
Thanks again Gina <3
Catherine
Hi Gina, back to voyage through the galazy!
Wow. That is always my first reaction to your poems <3 The feeling of drowning and dying that you make us feel in this is so terrifying and gripping honestly. I love how it goes from something so mundane as 'row E seat 12'.
He's then immediately sucked in by her voice like the rest of the crowd. Your descriptions in this 'the weight of too many bodies pining for air' and 'forgetting that breathing happens without thought', these are my favorite. Then the mourning of her voice is such an apt description for what happens after you witness such an amazing piece of art <3 It makes me miss live performance. The disparate nature from 'greedy lungful' to 'trembling silence' is such a talented way of writing. The highs and lows of performance are so well-done!
Thank you again for this amazing piece!!
Catherine
Hi Gina, here again for the galazy!
I couldn't even live review this like I usually do. I just love the way you formatted this, focusing on the 'you', the person that's missing from the speaker's life. It feels like such a longing for a lost comfort </3
It's all the things like the cat and the garden and the flowers tucked behind an ear that give me that feeling. And I love how you connect all these things, it really makes this read like a stream of consciousness in the best way.
Again, the way you signify the passage of time is so awesome. When you reference the garden at the end of the poem, it's a memory of a memory in itself, which is just so cool and reflective to read. I love how you write, Gina!!
Thanks again
Catherine :)
Hi Gina, here for the galazy event!
Your description here is something to be envious of <3 I love the way that you talk about the water and how it's affected by the wind. And also the word 'balm' as a verb is so pleasing to me :)
And the phrase 'watery suspension' to describe her hair is another thing of beauty <3 I how much life is in everything you describe here, it's part of what makes it so light.
And the tone seems to shift when we get to the second section. Wind arriving always denotes a change in something. And your verbiage here changes: lungs aching instead of filling, slumped under a blanket instead of tucked in, sun bleeding instead of shining. I just love the way you denote the passage of time and the shift in the mood!!
The last line leaves me a little breathless. We go from a very narrow environment to the sudden littering of the world. I loved this so much!!
Thanks Gina!
Space :D Space :D Space :D
Just :chefs kiss: There's so much softness in this poem. Like this quiet, resilience that has me so floored. It's beautiful Gina. Truely. The ending especially is what gets to me. This idea that the tide always returns - and returns with a desperation - I just love that.
These lines capture that idea of how uncontrollable a person can be, how erratic and uncertain, but that doesn't mean they're unsteady. It doesn't mean they don't know what they want and who they want.
And just the idea of give and take that is captured through this, the back and forth what's brought in and what's left and what's exposed. AHHH I seriously just read this three times and started to sway as I read it. There's MOVEMENT in the way you wrote this and that's just beautiful.
- Jacquelin
SS Voyager Here :D :D :D
Wow. This was a fucking gut punch in the best of ways. I feel sort of exposed just reading through it if I'm honest, like my own vulnerability is on display with feeling so connected to the circumstances you've described. That's freaking powerful. And it's so simply, like graceful not like easy. These stanzas that capture this emotion the world looks down upon - at least I feel like they do.
That feeling of helplessness or need or of a secret being discovered that you never wanted anyone to know or see. And I love that you found so much variety in that singular emotion, that not everyone feels it in the same way or for the same reasons. There's just something really human and like - vulnerable about that.
I really, really loved this. Freaking sleeping through your funeral - that line is going to stick with me.
- Jacquelin
i wanted to read another poem of yours so now i did, and this is so pretty. i love the imagery here - i love the ocean and it's partially because of this kind of sentiment if that makes sense? (symbolism? maybe symbolism is the word i'm looking for? anyway though that!)
<3 amazing job.
hey gina!
i do not have the emotional fortitude to write a lengthy or detailed review, but i read this and it brought back a lot of memories of my mom, and you did an amazing job and literally every single hug because i have also been there and it is fucking awful.
oh gosh this is stunning. It’s so dark, it sucks you in and just leaves you wanting, needing more. it’s really quite twisted, the way you paint the music, the audience sucking the breath from her, like in absorbing her song they’re stealing the life from her. sortof reflect in the way that artists, singingers, writers, actors just put so much of themselves into their art, they put their life and their emotions into it and it is like they're giving themselves to their audience. the imagery is so strong, in my head first we’re in a glamorous huge cavernous opera house and then the image switches and it’s bodys packed around, unable to breathe, i can picture it, it’s sweaty and smelly and uncomfortable ands warm. the switch between the two is incredible, and there's so much more, little details i could pick out. you throw emotions at us, and though this is so short i’m just in awe. you just flex these descriptive muscles, show us what you can do even in such a condensed piece.
the air thickened, her voice caged in a whispered decrescendo, beads of sound flitting as weary fireflies - this has got to be my favourite line, and it’s the one i’m left with at the end. it’s just haunting, and beautiful and so tragic.
d x.
veni, vidi, foxi
hi gina, back again for the winter in fairyland event!! :)
i lovelovelove the way you combine the music and the breathing to create this: it's dark and has this really quiet macabre edge to it which i adore, with the blue lips and the weight of the bodies making me think of people being crushed together - and the idea of describing breathing as bloating and deflating; ughhhh it's almost gory, making me think of corpses and how they bloat with water, and balloons deflating when you puncture them, with that kind of sad flop down as the air leaves until there's nothing left but a kind of wrinkled shell. it's so evocative and twisty and so brilliantly descriptive and it's so exactly up my street and it's so lovely. it's been a long time since i read anything of yours which was this dark, so i'd forgotten how well you do it but ughhhhh you do it so beautifully!!
the description in this is phenomenal too - as so often in your writing, poetry or prose - but omg. the details are just incredible. the way her voice flies, like a bird, the 'dimming memory of beginnings'; the repetition of bloating and deflating and the rhythm it creates in this whole poem, steady and regular and slow, like breathing (or, well, not breathing, i suppose, in the case of this poem :P). the idea of opera-goers being greedy for the music, needing it like food or water - and the way it twists so beautifully from the winged voice from before, like rain, and then the 'flitting as weary fireflies' - the sadness those two last sentences bring, quiet and dark and black-and-white and so solemn. it's so good. it's too good.
it makes me think of sirens, yk, this whole poem: the idea of music as this big, terrible, dangerous thing, luring people to their deaths by drowning; and ughhhh i don't know if that was the idea behind it but it works so well with the image and the setting of the opera and the spellbinding nature of this voice filling the room and reaching out to each individual person in the audience and capturing them.
psh. too good. seriously.
laura xx
ginaaaaaaa i've been waiting days for an opportunity to come back to read some more of your poetry, because the mermaid is one of those fics which has stuck in my head since i read it - so this winter in fairyland event was the perfect kick :P
omg omg omg so i'm sure other people have told you this but you're really an incredibly talented writer - whatever type of writing you turn your hand to. prose, poetry, long stories, short stories... you just do it all so well, with this really elegant style which i just love. and this really is just so beautiful, like everything else.
i think my favourite thing about your poems is how strong and clear and beautiful the images you evoke are: i can see and almost feel every image you write in this, from the stickiness of the palms, to the breath in the cold air and the cat whisking her tail away. it's so beautiful and it builds in this beautiful evocativeness without overloading the emotion and making it too 'loud': it's a softly emotional thing, with so much wistfulness and so much longing and there's a heaviness to it which works so well with the idea of missing someone and i lovelovelovelove it.
i love as well how you don't tell us why the person the narrator's talking to left - who they are - where they've gone - it's this beautiful mysterious edge which makes this poem so wonderfully universal :)
the rhythm of this is so so good. this kind of poem with the varying line lengths and syllable lengths intimidates me so much, haha, because the rhythm seems so hard to get right and to make work - because it's not set so yes there's a lot of freedom but there's also a lot of freedom to get it wrong - and it's just so so good. so lyrical, slow and fast and slow again, so meandering, as though the narrator is just musing out loud. it's so beautiful and so elegant and so perfectly done.
laura xx
It's like...the give and take of life? I really wanted to try and piece together the meaning of this one. I am not someone who always picks up on what others might consider to be "the obvious meaning," in terms of poetry, but I definitely like to try and figure it out. It's just fun to me for some reason lol.
Anyway, I felt like this piece read that life is full of ordinary moments that also give way to moments of desperation. What I mean by that is the stanzas two, four, and five, felt like "ordinary moments," where something either goes wrong or someone does something in service to another person.
Stanzas one and three feel like those moments in life where desperation creeps in. In my experience, people are more willing to talk to God when they're in need of something, whether it be for themselves or someone else they care about. In the third stanza, a bottle of pills could be anything from someone just trying to regulate sleep with melatonin, to something darker and deeper like antidepressents. Either way, it reads someone searching for some type of relief.
I think stanza six could operate in either one of these categories. Death is an inevitable part of life. Death can be welcoming or it can be feared.
I really felt though that these six stanzas depicted the course of someone's life? Like how God created everything in the beginning, God appears in stanza one. And then life ends in death, so the final stanza we are reading how someone dying and "sleeping through their funeral" (which by the way, is a GREAT LINE).
Anyway, I really enjoyed these collections of poems a lot! I hope you'll write more in the future. Thanks for sharing!
<3 Courtney
* left for the winter fairyland event, team ice otter *
You really have a knack for line breaks in this piece! The way this reads, the emphasis placed on certain words, just really had me excited as I was reading this. You feel the speaker's heart break in this, but there is also a feeling of "I'll be fine without you," that comes across. But the themes of carrying on without someone who was so significant in your life, and seeing them in places (like the sun in the church moment) you used to occupy with them is really difficult. I felt a heaviness in this piece, but it wasn't overwhelming with emotions. Again, I think the speaker is strong and self assured enough to feel heart break but not let it be the thing that defines them. And that are kind of the big themes I drew from this piece.
Also, my favorite section in terms of sentiment and in terms of how you broke up the lines was:
"Mr. Morley's hair is graying
round the ears. It is
wispy as the memory of the night
we danced underneath
the newly hung Christmas lights..."
I bolded the line that just seeled the deal for me in terms of "WOW this is a brilliant line." Another great poem here!
<3 Courtney
* left for the winter fairyland event, team ice otter *
The whole metamorphosis from mermaid to woman is captured in a darkish, fairytale sort of way. I mean referring to an "impure sun" that "stains with lazy, vaporous amber," an image that totally had me thinking of like the poisonous atmophere on Venus for some reason, and then "algae carcasses." And then kind of working backwards from that moment, we have a more distinctive image of a castle that screams fairytale all on its own.
The focus on the sun setting and how it is a fleeting, changing thing that also affects change on everything it touches is a great concept that you convey here. I really enjoyed this piece! Thanks so much for writing!
<3 Courtney
* left for the winter fairyland event, team ice otter *
this was beautiful. like really, it was just lovely to read, sad, but lovely. i love the way the thoughts flick, the memories weave. the images of a lost relationship that we don’t quite know the details of (at first i thought it was romantic but now it almost reads more like a family member which is almost even sadder) someone who’s missing from a life. it’s the sort of memories you would miss, the little things, like where they used to sit, or a comforting moment. the line about hair growing, the clear passage of time, the need to update on changes is so strong. it’s longing, all of this. it just screams out of someone who misses this peace of their life, who won’t fully be complete until it’s returned to them. if it’s returned. it’s all so ambiguous. i don’t know if they are truly writing, of if it’s all in the authors head. i love that it’s so open to interpretation. you’re probably laughing because i could be way off with that but i just feel like this could be read in an incredibly sad way or as hopeful, with the promise of benign reunited soon. but then there’s the line about settling for a letter, and it just casts a shadow over the sunny day.
(veni, vidi, foxi)
oh i love this. the colour, the sun, the flow of the ocean and the way the description flows and switches. the first paragraph is so full of life, it feels cool, easy, fluid. you capture her world, the underwater castle and the image of needle sharp towers that almost invokes a sharper, more sinister version of the little mermaid. in so little words you capture the underwater existence she has, and then of course it switch. out fo the water and suddenly it feels laboured, harsh. she can’t breathe, and her body is too heavy, it’s this sudden switch, and you can feel the difference, as a reader it’s like you physically struggle with her. the colors are still beautiful, but now the green dissolves and it’s a dry burnt orange, about as far from the sea as you can imagine. you’ve created such a vivid image, and in so little words, each one is deliberate, chosen so well. it’s all so beautiful and also just tragic. i loved this, i’ll definitely be back for more.
(for fox glory!)
Howdy Gina!
I am here to deliver your egregriously late TKO reviews!
The first thing that has to be mentioned is the excellent use of language to create and 'feel' for the piece. Coupled with your descriptions that precede the verb usage, I think it makes everything flow incredibly well from sentence to sentence. While I am not a poet or sophisticated reader of poetry, but I also enjoyed the cadence.
Perhaps my particular language throughout the story involved your use of adjectives and the particular verbs you selected (i.e. amplifies the fluttering pulse of fins).
Thanks for sharing!
Gina,
Congrats on your nomination!
So, I’ll be like every other review and start off with--beautiful description. You really did, however, paint a picture with words, not just the sensory of vision but but the touch of temperature and wind the sounds echoed through the poem. Even the sentence structure was like flowing, like it was joining her stroke for stroke in the waves.You packed quite a punch for only 130 words. Although some of these sensations are within a little witch’s imagination, her experiences became our experiences as she flows through the water. I particularly liked the idea of the castle breathing adding beautiful personification to such a sentient object. When she’s forced back onto the land, I love the sinking sun symbolizing the end of her illusion (or joy of her adventure depending on how you look at it.) and the warmth of the water and her life as an imaginary mermaid compared to the cold, harsh land and being back to reality.
Oh hey! Wow, this was really something of a poem! I love the narrative form, and I also love the economy of words that the narrative poetic form challenges the author to use. Here, you have done a brilliant job of making every word count. It’s like a word painting, if you will.
I think the most impressive thing about this poem is not only the description, which is wonderful, but how the description draws us in to the mermaid’s point of view. You throw in those verbs so skillfully, making us feel what she feels with the bubbles skirting over her skin. We get that underwater feel, when you tell us that there’s nothing to hear, only feeling the buoyancy of the water around her. I love the hair in suspension visual. The ‘silence’ is only the sound, because it doesn’t mean stillness. The water is moving all around, and it’s just like being underwater. I also love the movement you put into her dive. She’s not going straight down, she’s working for it, moving through the current. That’s just lovely as well.
There’s something special about the wind, and I wish you had more words to elaborate on that. I can see the sun setting, and the mermaid laying on the shore under a blanket, but I want to know more about the significance of the wind. Does it simply help tell the time? Does it signify bad weather coming in?
My favorite visual is the last part, with the algae carcasses. She’s shed her tail for legs, and of course there would be some evidence of that shedding. All of this begs for the whys and hows and what happens next, but it’s only a moment, and a moment that you’ve written so well. It should be a painting, hung on the wall, framed in gold and mahogany. I trully enjoyed reading this!
Pix
Oh, Gina, this is the most beautiful thing. I remember reading this a long time ago, and I can’t believe I never reviewed it! It is truly a stunning piece of prose poetry, and you stay true to the oxymoronic nature of the genre by using such poetic language while not letting the shape of the words define the perception of the piece. One thing I’ve noticed when I read poems is that my brain naturally has a tendency to pause at the end of a line, even if the sentence is enjambed onto the next one, which creates a break in the flow of the words (even if the poet intended for it to be that way) -- but with this story, I love how I can whisper it quietly to myself and everything’ll just wash over me without resistance. In a way, I think that’s incredibly fitting for the mermaid subject of this prose poem. <3
One thing that I really, really love about this is how you attach these powerful, unexpected verbs to their respective subjects. For instance: “The sun fans overhead…” or “...pearls of air balm her skin…” -- the use of these specific words in conjunction with all the others form an incredibly, incredibly specific image in mind. It creates an otherworldly feel, like an unintentional, hidden kind of magic, because a sun fanning is not something that one usually feels on Earth. When I read that, I imagined the beams of sun just brushing against her skin, fanning it, which is such a lovely image! And “pearls of air”! Normally, water is the thing that beads into pearls, but somehow it makes an amusing sort of sense that a mermaid would experience the opposite -- the pearling of the air. <3
There’s something very beautiful and powerful about this phrase: “...silence swells and amplifies the fluttering pulse of fins.” Like, the idea of silence actually augmenting something is just!! so worthy of exclamation points!!! Because that’s just such a unique, poetic way of looking at the world; the only place where the fluttering of fins can be heard is, of course, a place that contains silence. This makes me honestly want to go out right now and try to experience this wonder, to find a place that is so silent that perhaps I can hear the wings of a butterfly. I also love the mention of her fins, plural, because that just kind of makes me imagine her tail containing almost a dress-like train of long, fluttering fins.
And the CONTRAST. Oh, that’s the most gorgeous thing. The moment she trades her tail for legs, the world seems to darken around her -- which, I think, is entirely fair as I would likely feel the same way if I had her freedom as a mermaid. But wow, the shorter sentences, the duller colors, the disturbing image of “algae carcasses” is just unbelievably effective. I honestly never even thought about what dead algae would look like until you used that wonderful descriptor. <3
This is just amazing, Gina! Thank you for writing it. <3
Love,
Eva
Hey,
I don't know too much about poems but I know this is just beautiful! I can see why it's received its nomination for description. I'm so impressed about how much imagery that you've been able to pack into this poem. I think you've chosen your words so carefully because it has just a nice flow too. you've really used every word to build up this stunning vivid image of this beautiful mermaid.
I think some of my favourite things is how you describe that sunset. I think a sunset is something so simple but yet it's rather wondrous too. I think that you've captured that so perfectly in your description as 'bleeds low' 'burnt orange'. you make the most simple things so magical with your words. I think that magical is just perfect word to describe this poem. it just leaves you with a sense of total wonder. I hope some of this has made sense because I feel like this poem has left me with no words to say how mesmerizing this felt to me. thank you for making the archive a little more magical than they already are.
Abbi xx
Hi Gina! I’m here for CMDC Round 3 :D
You’ve done an excellent job with selecting just the right word for each and every part of this piece; enabling you to pack the tiny word count with so much description that the reader feels like she is there with the mermaid. It’s like we’re swimming in the words, and the whole piece feels like it’s breathing. In fact, that seems to be one of the central images—everything in the story, from the water, to the castle, to the mermaid herself, is alive.
I love how all the colors are so specific and tactile, and how many changes the sun goes through as it sets. I also love how the mermaid’s home in the water is so warm and welcoming, but when she goes ashore, the world out of the sea is so cold and unwelcoming. Basically the opposite of what a human would experience.
All of the descriptions are amazing, and I particularly liked the time you took with the mermaid’s hair, floating in the watery suspension (gorgeous!).
Yours,
Noelle
Hi Gina! Here for the HC opener.
I have to admit that I've not read much prose poetry, because it always seems a little intimidating to me, but whenever I stop by your AP I know that I'm going to find writing that's beautiful and stunning, and this was absolutely no exception.
Your description and imagery in this piece... honestly, wow is just about the only response that I can offer. It's breath-taking, and your word choice is unusual but incredible; every single word fits in so well, and I can tell it's been chosen carefully - but at the same time, they seem to flow so well, so naturally, that it's like they were always there. I've read this poem through a couple of times now, and each time I linger over different phrases. The description is, simply, stunning. It's so evocative and paints the picture in the poem beautifully.
I really loved the way that the first paragraph played to each of the different senses, creating a rich tapestry of the mermaid as she dances through the waves. The sentence structure in that paragraph also flowed in a way that reminded me of the waves in which the mermaid is swimming, which I thought was really clever. The second paragraph followed a slower, calmer pace, which mirrored the way that the mermaid returned to land and shed her tail.
The story in this poem was so intriguing, too. Everything about the poem was mystical and magical, but I couldn't help wondering whether this was a story about someone who was actually a mermaid, or a girl/young woman who felt like one when she was in the water, and then had to return to land at the end of the day. At the same time, this could actually be a mermaid, a woman who's come to land for any number of reasons, and I love all the magical, wondrous possibilities of her story.
This was really beautiful - thank you!
Sian :)
Hey there Gina! :) It's been far far far too long since I read anything of yours, and, honestly, this caught my eye so bad when I was browsing through the OF section, so I just had to stop by ;)
I'm always so so impressed by people who can write things like prose poems because, if I'm being totally honest, I don't exactly understand how they work, haha, but it seems super difficult and confusing and hard to get it right. But, that said, prose poetry is one of my favourite things to read, because it's always so beautiful. And this really, really isn't any kind of exception. It's just stunning?
Like, it's a really short story - and such a simple idea: a mermaid diving and then coming up onto land - but it's so complete and so vivid and so beautifully written that it made me smile and it created such a perfect image in my head, yk? The simplicity of it is so sweet and just kinda lets your words bring it all to life. Sometimes less is more and you've just so perfectly shown that there.
Your word choice is amazing. I just gotta say... it really, really is. 'Incandescent pearls of air', the sun described as 'bleeding low', 'burnt orange', 'no longer pure'. I mean just... ugh. It's so so good. I think my favourite is her hair 'stirred into watery suspension' - it just. it describes it almost too perfectly? There literally isn't a better, more succinct, way of saying it. It just... is. exactly that.
I love as well how well you evoke the mystical and the mythical and how effortlessly the description all flows with such a strong rhythm. The castle in the background, the mention of aching, now-human lungs to match her legs. How I can almost feel how cold her legs must be. How it feels as though it could be anywhere and everywhere at once; and it feels so normal, so every-day.
This is amazing. Honestly. I'm completely lost for words - hence this review is a lot shorter than I usually write - but I just... it's hard to find things to say other than just repeating over and over again that this is so impossibly beautiful. But it is, and you should be told that a thousand times over ;)
Laura xx
Hey, Gina! I'm here with a very belated review for the Nifflers event. This is on behalf of Stella Blue/Kristin.
Man, every time I read something you've written, I remember how much I love it, and wonder why I stayed away from your page for so long. I simultaneously enjoy and miss reading your writing. And this poem was a perfect example. I must admit, I know next to nothing about poetry, and I think this might be my first prose poem. I was under the impression that a prose poem was one that didn't rhyme, but this read more like a drabble to me. Part of the reason I enjoyed this piece was because it sat in between what a poem and a prose piece is. And you say so much with so little! I love how because there's so few words, it could be read as a mermaid shedding her tail in the literal sense, like a selkie. Or it could be read as a human who feels like they're a mermaid when in the water. But despite it having so few words, it's still so descriptive. That is one of the (many) things that I love about your writing. Honestly, your descriptions are just... *sighs dreamily*
This was such a lovely, enjoyable read!
xx 800
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