Monday, February 4, 2013

New Year’s Page Critique


                The piece seems to be experimental in the form, a stream of consciousness piece, like something someone would write with insomnia. This makes me think of the limbo between asleep and awake, with tired eyes and restless mind. Occasionally the long words and looping sentence structure reinforced by frequent commas lure the reader into this non-alert awake-ness. The title brings to mind New Years, which, like almost any other holiday, can mean celebration and drunken cheer for some and solitude drunken misery for others. I get the sense of a groggy, grumpy “I am awake and I shouldn’t be,” which is only supported by the dream like images and phrasing. There seems to be a lack of understanding, a second guessing of the speaker by him or herself, such as when “she wept with joy, although quite possibly she did so for some other reason”.  The words seems to push the reader faster along the page, pulling only the strongest images and stringing them together like some sort of haphazard snowflake chain.  There is so much imagery bombarding the reader it is akin to having their face handled and pointed in varying directions with dozens of voices prompting them to look a tone thing or another. In this way, the reader is rushed along through surreal image after surreal image, barely finding time to stop at the end, which is ironically pinched off at “The story keeps on going…” though this is an excerpt. 

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