Critical Response to Celina’s “After-Thought (Ghost Life)”

While the poem is short, pretty amusing, and fairly complete for its brevity, I feel like it has a lot of room for expansion. The idea of being a disembodied spirit missing your armpits (of all things) the most, is particularly fantastic. This sort of idea has been worked with before, but I think that Celina is taking it in a nice direction. The language is both mournful and sarcastic, which I don’t know if I like, even though I laughed at it the first read through. If she were to expand on this, I would like to see more of the little details like the act of trimming pubic hair or burping or the feeling of a rose petal between the fingers. From there, I would suggest going off into the world and describing the little things about the people the ghost once knew, the things that it misses. It would be interesting to also see how the ghost character’s thoughts reflect on its enemies that it had while it was still a living being. What Celina has in her poem, as I see it, is an amazing beginning to a much longer poem that could be both funny and powerful. Cheers to her.