Where I Go At Night by Zachary Schomburg

I liked the three line stanza structure of this poem. I thought it worked well even though the author has a single thought go across two stanzas. I liked the short lines, containing no more than six words. I was engaged in the poem right from the first stanza. Once I reached the end of the second stanza I couldn't wait to move on. The line, I become a huge expanding and contracting shapelessness, like a group of wild children at the zoo. What great images. The expanding and contracting shapelessness, what a wild picture that gives. It almost makes me think of the blob, but not in any sort of distracting way. Also the way he parallels his shapelessness with kids at the zoo is just fantastic. Mainly because i got a perfect image of a large group of children all moving together but in a most disorderly fashion. I also really enjoyed the idea of the author hovering over things. He states some very unique things like the fruit section of a lonely late-night supermarket, or the sleeping Japanese diplomat, and the corpses of Japanese working class. All of these are very interesting. Particularly the Japanese working class corpses. What a sad and beautiful image that is. It also added, at least in my opinion, a great of emotion to the piece. I found the end to be rather strange, but then thought about other poems that have done similar things. After rereading it I found the ending very fitting and i eventually grew to love how it flows from beginning to end.


Robert C. Carothers III