I hope this reaches her in time:
Truncation for Effect
r.h. Sin’s collection of poetry, I hope this reaches her in time, is the journey of a broken heart, of grief, and of rebuilding one’s self. Its poems are terse and to the point, charged with an almost typical angst and “you’ll be okay” sentiment. However, its staccato pacing ties the narrative together through Sin’s truncation of sentences: there are brief spurts of emotion and pared fragments that – albeit briskly – make the collection cohesive.
While not uncommon, this short, fast-punch style suits the arcs of the narrative: being left by a loved one, grieving, anger, and moving on to self-confidence are all emotions delivered with a flow of consciousness voice. The opening poem “good women are tired of giving” sets the tone with a brevity that permeates each piece in the work, cutting through it with short verses such as “the girl who deserves the sun / is tired of being rained on.”
Much like Sin’s book a beautiful composition of broken, I hope this reaches her in time relies heavily on these truncated sentences to produce dramatic juxtapositions: often existing as fragments of sentences, the individual lines punctuate the narrative. These snippets serve as tiny dagger pricks that help convey the poignancy of emotion of the narrator: “aren’t you tired of this shit / the constant struggle / the feeling of loneliness.”
The majority of the poems in the collection, also, evade the usage of proper punctuation full stops, leaving each line on the page hovering in its own space without a sense of stopping. The lack of punctuation permits the reader to string these snippets together, even when they might not necessarily scan as a joint phrase and render a more complex meaning, creating a Joycean effect that reflects the narrator’s state of mind: “and so the loneliness / will grow from the emptiness / you feel / those nights will be the toughest / those mornings, even tougher / it’ll hurt, you should have loved her.”
One key technique throughout the poems seems to lie in the composition of the stanzas themselves; many of the poems start and end with lines that could be taken together, paired on their own. One could cut out the middle lines and glean the entirety of the individual poem. Take, for example, this eleven-line stanza:
and all of this for a love
that turned out to be hatred
all of this for a heart
that never deserved yours
all of this hurt
for a relationship
that would never work
all of yourself
all of everything
invested into something
that now feels like nothing
The efficaciousness of this poem lies in its repetitive nature [of fragmented thoughts], but is ultimately completed by combining the first and last line of the verse: “and all of this for a love / that now feels like nothing.” This technique is employed throughout the work as another form of truncation; the two opening and closing lines package up the meaning in a brief scanning of the poem. While there is some variation to this affectation – obviously notable in the shorter verses – this technique remains consistent throughout and produces a unique, curt effect that propels the narrative forward at a swift, almost frantic, pace: “we become content / deepening the bruises” and “i needed to find myself / while trying to keep you” are two such examples of the proactive nature of the narrator demonstrated through this curtailing of the verse.
Ultimately, the truncation of the lines in I hope this reaches her in time creates a staccato pace throughout the work. It successfully builds up momentum to express the spiraling emotions of the narrator up until the final poem, which is the most truncated of all: “until next time, talk to you soon… / (call ends…).” This ending creates a sense of the narrator experiencing short bursts of emotions and ties together the clipped speech throughout the work; I hope this reaches her in time becomes, in essence, a one-sided telephone conversation with the one who broke your heart.
