Ugh. What’s wrong with parentheses? The em dash sees far more abuse (especially via those who insist that an em dash is a hyphen – it’s not!) I love parentheses and use them in both fiction and academic papers. Nothing wrong with them at all.
It’s also fun to see how much you can compound sentences {braces [brackets (parentheses)]}. I like playing around with them in my notes.
I’m also fond of ellipses. I like the word more than the punctuation mark itself. And I don’t understand the hate apostrophes get because I love ‘em. I’m quite possessive of them, in fact.
I’ve almost eliminated the exclamation point from my writing and try to limit my use of semi-colons. Nothing against the punctuation marks, but I was using them as a crutch too often. In poetry, however, everything is fair game.