[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Alex!

This villanelle with only one repetend feels like an exercise to me. And this poem is also more narrative than lyric. Both of which would probably have been okay with me, if either the variant form or the story had been more engaging.

But I struggled to see any advantage to writing a villanelle this way—frankly, it looks like the rule-bending is happening for no other reason than that writing villanelles the usual way is hard—and I didn't really care what happened to characters who rang so false.

Several things stood out to me as strange:

First, the pallbearers. Are they really clomping down the street from the funeral home to the cemetery? Is Uncle Pete enough of a celebrity to justify a public parade? Why isn't there just a hearse for that part of the journey? And if there's a horse-drawn hearse (as "clomping" suggests), then why are there pallbearers? Aren't pallbearers' duties pretty much limited to getting the coffin in and out of the hearse?

To me, "chain emails" suggests "chain letters" before it suggests "chain smoking," but since the former doesn't make sense in this context, the latter seems to be how the poem is using this term.

Surely the narrator would have said "book" instead of "tome," if not for the rhyme requirement. (But even if he had said "book," does one typically "loft-climb" to get those? "Shelf-climbing," maybe.)

I'm not sure what a "church cane" is. I've heard of "church fans," which are cheap paper fans sometimes made available in churches without air conditioning, but a cane seems far too expensive to give away like that.

"I meant to say a gnome" baffles me. "I meant to say something gnomic," perhaps? A gnome is something else.

In the last line, I don't understand what Facebook has to do with tweeting. Is that the point? That this obnoxious woman is too stupid to know the difference? If so, I don't think it makes a funny enough punchline to justify a villanelle-length poem.

Sorry I can't be more enthusiastic about this one. For me, the best part of the poem was “Online, here’s where I’d hit Delete.”