# Pitfall pack: poetry collection

*Type-specific traps for poetry drafting. Loaded after WRITING-RULES.md. STYLE-GUIDE.md wins where it conflicts.*

## Image traps

- Generic nature image as emotional shorthand (autumn leaves for melancholy, rain for grief, dawn for hope). Earn the image with specificity or surprise.
- The moon used as a metaphor without a fresh angle.
- The body as landscape without a fresh angle ("rivers of veins", "mountains of shoulders").
- Mirror, shadow, and reflection imagery as standard isolation tropes.
- Birds, especially when symbolic ("a bird took flight from her chest"). Watch the reach for them.

## Diction traps

- Latinate abstractions in lyric registers ("incandescent", "ineffable", "ephemeral") unless the writer's voice in STYLE-GUIDE.md is comfortable there.
- "Soul" used loosely. Earn it.
- Adjectives stacked on the same noun ("the deep, dark, endless sea"). Pick one.
- Capitalized abstractions (Love, Death, Time, Memory). Lowercase forces the writer to do the work.
- "Whisper" as a verb of choice for almost everything. Watch.

## Rhythm and music

- Iambic drift in free verse. If you wrote a sonnet, write it. If not, vary.
- End-stopped lines all the way down. Use enjambment to break expectations.
- Lines broken at every conjunction. Let lines do work.
- Forcing a rhyme that warps the syntax. Cut the rhyme or rewrite the line.
- Unintended internal rhyme producing nursery cadence in serious poems.

## Sentimentality

- Tears as the closing image.
- The grandmother as metonym for ancestral wisdom.
- Childhood photograph as elegy device.
- The lover described entirely through their effect on the speaker.
- Suffering rendered as nobility without complication.

## Confessional pitfalls

- Diary entries in line breaks. The line break must do work.
- Universalizing too fast ("we all carry our wounds"). Stay specific.
- Therapeutic tidiness. Real grief, rage, or longing rarely arrives shaped.
- Naming the feeling in the title and again in the closing line.

## Form pitfalls

- Free verse that is broken prose. Make the breaks earn their keep.
- Sonnet variations that abandon the volta. The volta is the form's gift; use it.
- Prose poems with no compression. Test against actual prose; if nothing is gained by calling it poetry, it is prose.
- Persona poems that do not commit to the persona.

## Closing pitfalls

- The final line that explains the poem.
- Ending on a question that the body of the poem already answers.
- Triple-spaced final stanza as gravitas. Earn the white space.
- "And so" / "And yet" / "But still" as the move into the close. Tic.

## Cohesion across the collection

- Same image used across multiple poems without development.
- The same closing move (return-to-childhood, return-to-body, return-to-grief) every fourth poem.
- Section breaks that group thematically with no internal arc inside each section.
- A title poem that the rest of the collection depends on for legibility. The collection should hold without it.