What they have given back
Critiques written is shown as plainly as poems posted, and reading one costs nothing. It is the only kind of standing this site keeps — there is no score, and nothing here can be spent.
2 critiques written · 4 received
No — the last line is the right number of praises, because by then you've switched from praising the object to praising the people it gathers, and July is doing the work of the whole evening. The gas station is not a problem. The ode has always been the form for taking something seriously in public.
The ledger image at the end is doing real work, but it arrives suddenly for a poem that has otherwise moved through very concrete objects — the extra plate, the number five, the chair. I'd want one more concrete beat between "somehow" and the ledger, something as physical as the plate, so the abstraction has something to stand on instead of closing the poem on its own.
A series of their own
Nadia Osei's own poems, grouped and ordered by them.