This was a strong piece, with a good ear for language. I can't really suggest any great improvements, though I did feel at the end that the 'mother-fuckers', although deserved, was not really in fitting with sombre and scholarly tone of the rest of the poem. Perhaps that was the effect you wanted, but it didn't entirely work for me.

I enjoyed this and didn't find the fact I had not read previous chapters an impediment to that. It's full of action and zips along at a fair pace. I couldn't see any obvious grammatical or technical faults to it, perhaps the "rabbit chased by hounds" simile is a bit cliche, plus I'm not sure how much hunting with hounds went on in Ancient Egypt and the comparison certainly seems a little incongruous. The dialogue is good but although Qebera could hear the Bedoins' accent, I couldn't, it seeme...

The paragraph that stars 'My hand shakes as I bring the lighter to the end of my cigarette' was kind of a jolt to me. The narrative seemed to jump suddenly from fairly retrospective interior musings to a physical act in the present, and suddenly Leah was there too. It just didn't feel like it flowed very well. I'm not sure how much I could read of this because it's next to impossible to feel anything for this character. We are told that, concerning Leah 'She loves me and I think I love her' -...

This opened with a great hook "When I considered why, I didn’t immediately remember the statistic" - what is the statistic? Wanting to find out kept me reading. When we got to "My first thoughts involved entering at night. I had heard horrible stories like that, the poor girls..." things took a more sinister turn, and the story became very uncomfortable. When it becomes clear the narrator is talking about rape the story does become a whole lot less appealing, and I questioned the 95% statisti...

Since we don't know the girl he tries to kill, or her former connection to Kashin, we do not know the scale of the crime may be about to commit against his own heart, is she the love of his life, his daughter, a servant or a stranger? Our ignorance of this decidedly reduces the power this scene could have. Is this a critical choice for Kashin? There's a slight problem with this in that we don't actually know what kind of person he was in life. I understand this will be revealed as the story g...

?"Long ago, when the streets were still cobblestone and littered with the rats infested with fleas and disease roamed freer than the people" This is a really nice opening line, the personification of disease sets the tone wonderfully. The rest of the piece follows in this tone, with rich language that sometimes borders onto purple prose "the courtesans who poured the scents in rivets down their suckled necks." You should be careful not to get too carried away with overwrought descriptions at ...