This piece is excellent! It is unassuming, direct, has excellent character development, excellent pacing, and is very engaging. The plot is made more intriguing by references to when the father had tried athletics in his youth. The story revolves around a single, critical event in the relationship between the father and his son - a race. I love how, in the end, the father is ostensibly generous in handing the race to his son, when it is actually the father who is incapable of finishing the ra...

Hello. Here are some comments on your stage play. Usually, the actual play's text is preceded by a Dramatis Personae listing, and then a scene heading with brief introductory text. This helps to give the director and cast a better idea of the setting and characters. Your dialogue is very funny and engaging. Personally, I felt that it came on too strong, too quickly. Perhaps if you were to ease into the outright bickering, it would give it more power. In any case, well done!

This piece is touching, as long as it's interpreted correctly. It might just be because I've been reading a lot of Palahniuk, but initially I thought this was going in the direction of sexual molestation. A few key descriptive passages could clear up that ambiguity in no time. Good work.

(I reviewed this piece before, but my browser crashed.) I love how unabashedly physical this poem is. It gets right down to the world of engine grease and thrill racing. One of the things you could do to improve it is to strengthen your rhythm. The rhythm in your third stanza is flawless. Here's a (hastily written) example of a way to make the second stanza consistent with that: "I let off the clutch exhaust shrouds my smile they finally grip and tear up the mile" (or some such thing). It's a...

Your metaphors are good; my favourite is "how not to burn / even though I am on fire." However, I find the rhymes to be a bit of a stretch. 'Higher' doesn't perfectly rhyme with 'tired', and neither of them rhyme well with 'fire.' Ideally, the consonants would be similar, as well as the vowels. If you're looking for a well-structured poem, you may want to make the number of lines per stanza consistent (the first and last have five, but the middle has six). The poem would be made more powerful...

Your diction is generally well-constructed from a basic standpoint, but the overall path of the poem is too cryptic for my preference. By "into by back", you likely mean "into my back". There's an accidental "until" duplicate on the last line. Again, the poem is too cryptic for my tastes and does not lead the reader in any firm direction, but your basic writing style has potential.

This is a pretty song; I like a lot of the imagery. My absolute favourite part is - "A time will come When we all will die And the young relieve the old. And our bodies become The leaves on the trees And our souls the rocks in the streams." It's a simple, understated, elegant metaphor, and it's truly beautiful. It isn't pretentious. Many poems are overly cryptic and don't "let the reader in on it"; yours is the opposite. Much of this poem lends itself well to being sung, but some of the rhyth...

This poem is really, really sweet. It's unassuming, direct, and simple. From a technical standpoint, I highly respect the fact that you didn't try to rhyme anything. A lot of the time, with poems of this genre, rhyming just ends up sounding very cheesy. This is an all-around well-executed poem; keep up the good work!

This poem is a sight for sore eyes. You don't write presumptiously, because you didn't rhyme anything, but you still had strong structure in your meter, rhythm, and stanza shape. There are only a couple of small ways in which you could smooth out your meter. "Swift observance is his weapon His sun has set so many times His life has passed but still he teaches" could become something like: "Swift observance is his weapon His sun set so many times His life passed but still he teaches" This just...

The concept of the poem is very interesting, but there are several problems in its execution. Instead of saying "A distilled scream was heard at night" it is more direct and emotionally evocative to write "(someone) heard a distilled scream at night" Involving an actual person, whether it be the reader, the narrator, or a third party, generally creates more intrigue. You want to avoid redundancies, like "it flies, as if in flight." If it flies, you can bet that it's as if it's in flight, and ...