One of the most interesting things about Olga Broumas's book Beginning with O was her use of line breaks. In all of these poems she uses every line break to her advantage wasting none of them, like in "Beauty and the Beast"

For years I fantasized pain
driving, driving,
me over each threshold
I thought I had, till finally (55)

By breaking on these end words she is able to make each line it own statement which almost functions separately from the poem, yet at the same time adds depth to the poem's ultimate meaning. These line breaks make her poems slippery at times. When I was reading a poem I thought I knew where the poem was going and where Broumas was taking me as a reader. I thought I knew until I read the next line. It kept me on my toes, and kept me guessing until the very end of the poem. This was one of the things that I enjoyed the most about all of her poems.

It was also interresting to compare Broumas's fairytale poems to Sexton's fairy tale poems. When I began to read these poems I could see the influences that Sexton had on Broumas. I also liked to see Broumas's take on these particular fairy tales which where at times fairly close to Sexton, and at times no where near Sexton.

The thing which really set Broumas's fairy tale poems apart from Sexton's was the way Broumas jumps right into her transformation of the the tale and really transforms the fairy tale. Like in "Beauty and the Beast" where Broumas does not even seem to pay the original tale any mind. Instead she simply uses it as a framing story for the story she wants to tell.

I remember reading in one of the essay's at the begining of this class something along the lines that re visioning these fairy tales and myths is a kind of mask, so I have to wonder sometimes whether or not Broumas used these poems to hide something she did not want the reader to see. While with Sexton's poems I had to ask what exactly was being re visioned, with Broumas I have to ask why are these being re visioned. Why is Broumas using this mask in her poetry? It could be because it meshes well with her subject matter. It could be to protect her self, after all if you're not careful a poem can steal something from you.