No One's a Mystery- Elizabeth Tallent

I really liked “No One’s a Mystery” by Elizabeth Tallent because the conflict is so apparent and realistic. There are two levels of conflict in this piece. The first level is that Jack is cheating on his wife with a much younger woman. The second level of conflict is where the younger woman sees their relationship going and where Jack sees their relationship going. The first level of conflict is revealed in the first paragraph when the younger woman has to hide on the floor of the truck to avoid being seen by Jack’s wife who is driving past them. This conflict is the stage for the main, deeper conflict: the discordant views that Jack and the younger woman have on their relationship. This conflict is played out through the dialogue and uses the five year diary that Jack got her as a birthday gift as a means for them to see what their future would be like. Jack believes their relationship will just be a fling, but the younger woman believes they will get married and have kids. He has a more realistic and jaded opinion, while she is more optimistic and naive. The dialogue makes the conflict apparent through tone and the repetition of words. These devices work well to highlight the emotion behind their conflict.

No One's A Mystery Reflection

No One’s A Mystery

While reading this prompt, I mainly looked out for the ways dialogue made the characters and their conflicts stronger. When Jack is explaining the predictability in his wife’s actions, I could tell that his love for her was no more or was never there to begin with. The most powerful moment of dialogue is the exchange between the narrator and Jack as they debate what she will write in the diary he bought her for her eighteenth birthday. While they both spur out scenarios, entailing their possible future, Jack’s seemed to be more pessimistic yet realistic. There is an age gap between the narrator and Jack, I’m assuming it’s relatively large, which makes their relationship seem more temporary than long-term. However, I can tell that they both wish it to be long-term, although the narrator seems to be the optimist already mapping out a future that may never happen. While it is not explicitly said that there is a problem in their age difference from their dialogue it’s apparent that age is a factor that can easily tear Jack and the narrator apart.

"Hills Like White Elephants" and the Hemingway Iceberg

Emily Hughes

November 4, 2014

I am indefinitely drawn to Hemingway's writing style.  I loved "Hills Like White Elephants" and have always admired his idea of writing like an iceberg.  By taking such a minimalist approach to language construction, Hemingway creates stories stripped of everything but pure emotional charge.  This ability to draw out characters' innermost emotions gives an unmatched intensity to both "Hills Like White Elephants" and "Indian Camp."

In "Hills Like White Elephants," Hemingway is able to create two distinct characters using simple dialogue and extremely minimal prose.  The characters are not even given names, and are referred to as "the American" and "the girl with him."  The scene begins with a short discussion about drinks and the landscape (the "hills like white elephants").  However, Hemingway quickly shows his reader that this train station conversation is only the top eighth of the metaphorical iceberg.  

Their casual conversation seems to hide a larger secret, which can be observed by the disjointed commentary of the man and the girl early on in their dialogue.  Their thoughts are not directed towards anyone in particular; both the American and the girl with him are speaking words without hearing the other's response.  They are both quick to comment on everything but their situation (the hills, the beaded curtain, the taste of their drinks) which only serves to perpetuate the uncomfortable avoidance of the girl's surgery decision. 

When they do begin to discuss the possible abortion, Hemingway begins to create a heavy distinction between these two characters and their personal motivations.  It becomes clear that the American is trying to focus the conversation on her surgery and the decision it entails.  The girl refuses to discuss the actual pregnancy or abortion, instead insisting on ordering more drinks and idealizing their relationship's past.  Both of these actions emphasize how intensely she has grounded herself in a romanticized past.  Hemingway ends the story with the girl's insistent statement, "There's nothing wrong with me."  This brings the conversation full circle, and ends both characters in the same emotional place they began.

Maneh Nov 4 Indian camp

This short story kept taking unexpected turns. It was extremely hard to predict what was going to happen next. First, the opening started with the doctor telling his son the woman was sick. I was expecting something like the flu, not a pregnant woman. Things took a turn towards the more dramatic side when the doctor decided to do a cesarean without anesthesia while using primitive tools. It was a great insight into the back in the day when that's all there was and this is now things were done. Also the father to be committing suicide was very real reality of that situation. Imagine seeing your wife go through that much pain and the life of your new born son and wife at risk. I wouldn't want to see the outcome of that scenario either.

Mann's "Still Life"

Emily Hughes

October 20/24, 2014

I found that Mark’s Vietnam monologue in “Still Life” offered the most powerful voice from the three readings. The raw and vivid nature of the character’s voice seems to come from the reality of his situation. A lot of this seemed originate from Emily Mann’s interview with a real Vietnam vet, but most of the monologue’s strength comes from Mann’s use of understatement. 

When the speaker addresses the horrors he faced in war, he does not offer any detail beyond the truth of his experience. Phrases like “I killed them with a pistol in front of a lot of people” and “I killed three children, a mother and father in cold blood” allow the graphic nature of the situation to speak for itself. This choice of language also gives a more accurate impression of the narrator’s shell shocked memory; the horror of his violent past does not allow Mark to openly describe his own experiences.

Still Life

While this piece is about the internal struggle of the character Mark, it made me consider and grapple with some of the questions he was facing. What does it mean to be a good or bad person? Once someone is "good" or "bad," do they stay under that category permanently? How much of our actions can we attribute to the environment around us? Mark is convinced that he is and forever will be a bad person, yet he desperately wants to be redeemed.
Personally I struggle with answering these questions as well, although with less severe experiences than Mark. I was raised with Roman Catholicism, where any sin, no matter how great, is forgivable under God if a person is truly sorry for what they have done. Despite this, there are crimes that I don't think I could ever forgive. It's not really possible to find an absolute that distinguishes "good" from "bad" in people.

Just a little Lethal by Oates

This piece is very effective in gradually revealing the narrator's character. It begins sounding almost sweet, repeating the "just a little" almost to imply innocence. There is even an implication that the addressee giggles, something the reader can take as an indication that this attention is wanted. But soon after this we see the narration fall into something darker, a much more forced nature. The "just a little"s be an twisted excuse by the narrator, telling their partner that it's not bad if it's "just a little" despite the fact that they are straining away and maybe even screaming. They're even told that this is ridiculous, as the narration turns overtly hostile and accusatory, turning the blame on the addressee.

The paragraph has a complete arc in which we become wary of the narrator and eventually find ourselves struggling with them.

Lethal Reflection

I really enjoyed lethal because of the emotion illustrated in the writer’s language. Joyce managed to let the reader inside the narrator’s head without starting with blasé phrases like “I felt” “I thought”, etc. Instead she uses the method of repetition, which becomes quite effective as the prompt goes on. She goes from the narrator’s cravings of “I just want” to a more aggressive and hostile tone with the repetition of “You want.” Ironically, I read this prompt after writing my own monologue and managed to find that my writing style mimicked Joyce’s.

Sympathy in "Still Life" and "Lethal"

I was struck by how monologue functioned differently in these two excerpts.   Both of the narrators are from the edges of humanity.  One is a soldier who took advantage of his time in the army to enact violence upon families and children and the other one is a rapist, or at least, he wants to be.

    "Lethal" left me with no sympathy.  I almost felt tricked because of the gentle way that the narrative began.   "I just want to touch you a little" and "I just want to caress you a little",  it sounds almost sweet, a character just wanting to be close. to another person  As the monologue gains momentum however, that changes.   The requests become more invasive and the speaker becomes angrier and angrier by his object's refusal to remain an object, by the 'NO'.   At the end, this became a character that I reviled because of his insistent feeling of entitlement to another person's body in relation to building his own identity.

 "Still Life" while dealing with violence and with a lack of humanity, was resonant in a different way. I think partly it was his use of the past tense, situating his actions as things that happened not today, that made me more sympathetic.  But it also was his self-awareness.  The character uses the monologue to confess without seeking any kind of forgiveness and because he is self-aware, I felt sympathy for this character who admitted to killing people.  Not in an absolving kind of way, but there was definitely a twinge of something sympathetic.

It made me wonder about the ways that sympathy can function in a narrative and what characters are we, as readers, naturally disposed to be sympathetic towards. When characters are not self-aware, when they exist in a vacuum in which they are owed something, it puts this reader at least on the defensive.  The difficulty in navigating a character who lacks a self-consciousness is that this is a consciousness in which the reader does have insight.  This is frustrating.  However, when a character is self-aware, when they are acknowledging their actions and their culpability, I trust the character to have an awareness of themselves that then prompts sympathy.

"Lethal" by Joyce Carol Oates

I would say that voice is established within the very first few lines of this piece. Oates employs a tremendous amount of repetition, especially in the beginning. The "a little" sentences followed by various parts of the woman's body set up a sort of pace and rhythm. There's also many breaks throughout that expose, not just the violent narrator losing his train of thought, but the breaks also speed up the pace of what's being said. Exclamation points also accent this sort of frantic speed at which the narrator is speaking in, i.e. "Don't giggle! Don't squirm!" Also, the first person and how Oates' character describes not just his intentions, but also his sort of commentating on his victim's reactions with lines like that evoke the terror at what's happening. Furthermore, I thought the last few sentences and the last paragraph show a shift in the character's emotions to a certain extent. While at first in a place of power and domination, the narrator is humiliated, and it's through his asking questions and italicization Oates shows us that he's getting angry and more frustrated, thus giving the reader a snapshot as to the maniac that's being described.

Twirler - Martin

This monologue establishes voice almost immediately. She jumps right into her story and starts from where her twirling all began. The voice speaking is excited and proud. She talks about how good she was at twirling and her accomplishments. It's a summary of her career. The writing contains lots of pauses created by the commas. This imitates someone speaking as they would have to pause to take breaths. The grammar is also not correct, also making the monologue more speech-like. The fast speed reminds me of an excited child telling a story. The inconsistencies also remind me of a child speaking. She mentions how her hand was crushed by a horse and took her away from her highest level of twirling making me wonder how great she really was. Either way, she has an absurd amount of confidence in her skill and I applaud her for that.

Lethal by Joyce Carol Oates

When reading "Lethal", this narrative reminded me of two stories.  I may be making a terrible comparison with an actual work of literature and something that was published on fanfiction.  It's just the style of writing from both of these stories that seemed to share to some similarity with "Lethal".  You don't have to know these characters or the universe both of these stories take place in.    

Here is a link to both stories:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4529687/1/Adenium-Erotica

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3269958/1/Summer-Shudder

Still Life by Emily Mann

I have never been in a war zone, nor do I personally know anyone who has. Despite that, I found the heart of this piece very relatable. Throughout, Mark, the narrator, is trying to both share and conceal the action that is eating him away inside, giving hints and clues but only calling the action "it." He knows now that it was a terrible thing to do, one single action that will haunt him and color his perception for the rest of his life: the brutal annihilation of an entire family. But it isn't just about the action-- it's about the framework and culture of war that led him to that act. Even though he was the only one complicit in that final act, the context of his life in the military before then, of control and power, which led him to feel, in that moment, that it was okay. That atmosphere of possibility, that lack of responsibility, is something I feel everyone has known, even if not to such extremes. I have known moments in which I had the possibility of, and was perhaps encouraged towards, doing something that I either felt or knew was wrong because of that sense that the rules didn't apply to me in that situation. Magnified out of the standard proportion of daily life, this piece makes me rethink the boundaries of we are and are not willing to-- it all depends on the context of the situation.

"Lethal" - Joyce Carol Oates

“Lethal” by Joyce Carol Oates was the piece that grabbed me the most this week. At first, it seemed like a letter to a lover, but then it changed into something menacing and, well, lethal. This piece is a roller coaster of emotion. It starts off loving and tender. It then becomes more aggressive with the line, “I just want to measure your skeleton with my arms.” I don’t think a declaration of love would include skeletons, which are associated with death. That was the first time I thought there was something off about the narrator. The narrator then becomes persistent and uses visceral imagery. The line, “It won’t hurt if you don’t scream but you’ll be hurt if you keep straining away like that, if you exaggerate,” is the point when I realized the narrator was raping this woman. After this line, I feel like we take a nosedive into the narrator’s psyche and it’s completely terrifying. It’s terrifying because it goes from what he wants to what he thinks the woman thinks of him and what she wants to do to him. He turns himself into the victim and turns the victim into the attacker. He fights for his life by raping her; that’s his way of defending himself from her supposed attack. He is a completely unreliable narrator because any person who saw this happening would see that he’s attacking her, but he thinks it’s the other way around. I think that’s what makes this piece so chilling; it’s the fact that everyone can see his narration is unreliable, but to him it’s the complete truth.

"Lethal" by Oates

In the beginning of the prose, the first person voice comes off as trying to convey affection for a lover. Oates masterfully creates the impression of tenderness and intimacy through his choice of words “caress, comfort, embrace, kiss.” The longer sentences also helps to slow down the piece and give it a sense of calm. For me, the first abrupt and powerful pause was when he goes “I just want to hold you tight!- like this.” I immediately get a strong sense of desire and dominance. The use of punctuations to dramatize and then pause helps to vividly capture the act as it is happening. I can hear the words and see the actions unfold.

Following this, the tone changes from calm to authoritative. The feel of dominance continues. I especially feel it when he goes “These are strong arms, aren’t they.” There is no question mark. It is a statement. Hereafter, he almost sounds psychotic to me. By this point, I am sure he is not a lover but a rapist, because he threatens to hurt the person if he or she keeps straining. The choice of word also changes drastically to “hurt, poke,” and the voice is threatening.  The sentences also get shorter and that conveys a sense of urgency and menace.

Towards the end I could also see struggle between desire and conscience. When his desire takes over, to justify his act he starts to blame her.

Still Life_Mann

It took me a while to understand what this piece was about. It established voice almost immediately for me however and I was drawn into it. I felt as though someone was confiding in me as though I was a therapist. It was raw and descriptive; the emotion was real from the second line.

            The opening line “I don’t think you understand”, sets the whole piece up to be a mystery. How could anyone understand, he isn’t talking to a fellow comrade who witnessed as he did, he is talking to a nobody, and how could we ever understand what he understands? The whole piece felt conversational and casual. It was easy to feel, without necessarily understanding.

Casualty- Seamus Heaney

It seems we all go to bars frequently and not always in college towns, but I still have not come to find someone like this guy who is that stereotypical bar-sitter who is always there, doesn't seem to know anyone but everyone recognizes him. It seems that no where is as comforting to him as the bar where everyone is there for similar reasons, so socialize and for this person, to drink and socialize. I really liked this poem because it gave the inside view of someone who likes the comfort of drink and the bar.

Frying Trout While Drunk by Lynn Emanuel

This piece was very effective in illustrating a character with very little blatant descriptions. Other than the line "She is a beautiful, unlucky woman" (Emanuel) we discover what the mother is like through her past actions and current situation. I took note of this piece the most because I was pleased with how minimal a piece could be to fully give a sense of character. I am accustomed to long paragraphs, or even novels, to expound upon a character and often forget that a twenty-nine line poem can be just as effective in creating a unique perspective of a character, possibly independent of the character's actions.

The narrator here describes their mother as a tragic beauty, and that is what shapes our view of her, but they do not leave out the various ill-conceived decisions  she  has made. While we still see very clearly her alcohol abuse and tendency towards self-harm, the mother is romanticized somehow in the way her child remembers her, giving us two possibly conflicting views of her: that of the suicidal drunk, and that of the mistreated young girl.

The Student's Wife Reflection

The Student’s Wife exhibits the kind of writing style I wish to integrate into my own writing. Raymond Carver creates two characters that become so real and relatable in just a short prose piece. Carver begins with husband who is tired and ready for bed, but when his wife wakes up the bland characters that were briefly introduced become dimensional in an unexpected way. Carver first illustrates the character’s actions, which adds better detail than saying “the husband was tired” or “his wife sat up and wanted to talk to him while he tried to sleep.” An example of detail that stuck out for me was when the husband asks his wife about her dream. We know, without the writer explicitly saying so, that the husband is asking out of courtesy and not genuine interest because he asks her this as he turns onto his side away from her. Along with the details, Carver adds dialogue that gives the characters, especially the wife, dimension. When the wife starts listing her likes and dislikes, we the readers are entering her thoughts. We don’t know who Janice Hendricks is but we know that she means something to the wife and therefore wanders around in her mind. The wife at the end says that she wants to “live a good honest life without having to worry about money and bills and things like that.” So much is revealed about the wife in that section of dialogue, however I’m still left surprised when she gets on her knees and prays for God’s help at the end. This is the kind depth I want for the characters I write about. I want to keep my readers surprised like Carver has done beautifully.

The Student's Wife

I found this piece unsettling, which I think is because Nan's growing panic over the course of the story is so relatable in the writing. She starts out almost sleeping peacefully, but by the end the world has spun entirely out of her control.
Nan's desperation felt real to me because of the way she is characterized. She seeks out every comfort of her daily life in the hopes that it will bring her mind peace enough to sleep, from having a sandwich to brushing her teeth and checking in on the children. After all these attempts, she is left with no progress. Reading through and expecting something to change in the story only to be left in failure really gave me access to her hopelessness. Unlike her memories, none of Nan's current life is explored with any meaning other than a way to keep her mind busy. When the morning came and she did not experience any relief, if felt as if she never would.

Fragmentation and "Flying Trout While Drunk" and "Minor Miracle"

 

          Lynn Emanual's poem "Flying Trout While Drunk" was particularly resonant.  Her poem consists of fragmented images: "wrist deep in red water", "She is a beautiful, unlucky woman", "Buttons ticking like seeds spit on  a plate".  These all create an image of chaos, contained within the poem.   This fragmentation compliments the rhythm of the work as well as it is at once disjointed but, via the use of selective word choice, very vivid.   I also liked the lack of quotation marks when speech enters the poem.   It gets folded into the wider narrative and this narrative, composed of images, seems to subsume even the mother's own voice.
         The subject matter of the poem is very artfully portrayed through these techniques.  The narrator's childhood memories are related as snapshots that provide the reader with an idea of the hectic and unstructured upbringing the narrator alludes to.   The combination of her mother's love for this man and her drinking allows the reader to connect these behaviors.  This implication is that they are thematically related as both are symptoms of the disease that the mother has, and perhaps the daughter shares.  That the daughter's own behavior is included but not the focus of the poem captures the way that the family narrative (the origin myth) is created, and emphasizes the eclipsing power of the mother's illness.

***Last week's Reflection***

Marilyn Nelson's poem "Minor Miracle" is very restrained in its description, which allows for the actions and events to become more poignant.  By keeping the prose and word choice stark, the focus shifts from the images created by the poem to the action upon which the poem's climax hinges.  I thought that phrases such as "knock-on wood memory" and "The afternoon froze" create aural images very well as one introduces action and the other creates an implicit image of life halting in fear.  
    I was struck by how the inclusion of minor details such as "homemade finger tattoos" was able to convey so many implications and assumptions about the character without actually telling the reader.   The way that the observations are listed felt defensive to me.  The reader can tell that she was regarding the racist man as a potential threat and this can be felt in the short, but focused, inclusion of detail.   I also really liked that the emotions of the other characters were apparent without being spelled-out.  It allows for the reader to experience their own reactions, though through the perspective of the narrator, unfiltered.

"Aunt Sue's Stories" by Langston Hughes

This poem, though simple in structure, struck me through its strong use of repetition, which serves to emphasize the key elements of the narrative. First is Aunt Sue, most likely the aunt of the child to whom she tells stories. She tells stories of black slaves, in different scenarios and conditions, stories that come not from "out of any book at all," but instead from her own life experiences, presumably as a slave herself, stories of the life she was forced but a fate from which the child has been saved. The simple but effective descriptions allow the reader to experience the summer night but within their own context, bringing to mind their own experiences of similar hot nights spent outside, listening to anecdotes presented as anonymous stories.

 

This poem is made powerful through its specifically chosen yet general descriptions, giving away nothing but evoking everything. Each read leads to the creation of another internal detail and a greater desire to understand and hear Aunt Sue's stories for one's self.

The Student's Wife- Ray Carver

The piece I connected with this week was “The Student’s Wife” by Ray Carver. I really liked this piece because it created a sense of nostalgia. Carver did this by using description to create a history and want for that history by Nan. I got a good sense of who Nan was when she listed what she liked and how that was contrasted with the fact that she can’t afford most of the things she likes. This contrast, added together with the story of Nan and Mike fishing, showed Nan’s want for a better time. It made Nan, and myself along with her, feel nostalgic for what was and what could have been. I think another reason why I felt a sense of nostalgia was because I imagined my grandparents as Nan and Mike. There’s a line in the first paragraph, “…stopped only to reach to the nightstand for a cigarette,” that completely transported me back to my grandparents. They were both smokers and I know how much my grandfather cared for my grandmother. I don’t know if he read to her, but I feel like he did other little acts like that to show how much he loved her. It’s also a funny coincidence, but my grandmother’s name was Fran and the wife’s name is Nan. Nan is definitely more dramatic than my grandmother was, but I think they both have a sense of the melancholic that helped me place my grandmother in Nan’s shoes. Being able to visualize these characters as people I actually knew, added another layer to the nostalgia because it made me want for a time that they were still alive.

Carver, "The Student's Wife"

  Carver so creatively captured such extreme emotions of desperation and yearning in his piece “The Student's Wife.” I loved how these strong emotions were conveyed so subtly through a conversation. The details were not thrown at the reader but rather woven into the melancholic conversation and descriptions. The subtle build up of tension was continuous throughout the piece. I got impatient a few times when Nan kept on with the conversations, and when Carver confined the setting to the room. However, I felt this was a very interesting way to make me relate to the character-Nan who was miserable and desperate to break free from the life she was living.

My favourite part was the ending. It was so unexpected and such a big contrast to the subtle conveyance of desperation. It almost felt like an explosion of the tension that was building up. I thought it perfectly summed up and magnified the serious issue at hand.

lynn Emanuel "Frying Trout While Drunk"

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree resonates loudly to me in the piece. We are tormented our whole lives by the actions of our parents. The happy, the sad, the bitter, the fun, the memories of them always stay with us. I really enjoyed the colorful writing it felt as though we were reliving the memories of a distraught youth.

The tenderness and painful oblivion he writes in regard to her mother echoes. We are so enamored through youth of our parents, but hindsight of our youth can sometimes leave us harboring different emotions towards those who raised us.  

I sometimes find myself looking at my own actions thinking, “wow, I am just like my mother…” we are raised in the image of our parents, they are everything they never wanted to be and the cyclical pattern continues as offspring repopulate the planet.

Carver's "The Student's Wife"

I really admired this short prose piece, especially since difficulty in falling asleep is something I'm faced with almost every night. But in all seriousness, I think what Carver does here the best is the dialogue he crafts between Mike and Nan. Over the course of this piece, their relationship goes from normal/happy, to unhappy/dysfunctional/unfulfilled. This in large part is shown with the dialogue, because over the course of the night, the longer Nan can't manage to fall asleep, Mike becomes more and more able to, and even does so while she's trying to talk to him. Also, Mike's responses become more and more monosyllabic over the course of the night/piece. Another key part of this piece too was the anecdotal parts, i.e. when Nan relates her dream to Mike, or when they're taking about their night on the Tilton River. Carver crafts these little monologues of imagery very well, and they embody the classic "show, don't tell" trope that writers are taught to strive for. Lots of sensory descriptions that really paint the scene in other words. In those little passages, we also see a side of the couple that isn't in the text's "real time" so to speak, and the reader is led to believe, or at least, the connotation of these passages makes it seem like we, as the reader, are supposed to interpret this as the times when the couple was happy. Even the small details on how the bed looks, and the contour of the blankets and Mike and Nan in the bed are so well crafted and genuine. Furthermore, Carver's descriptions of the bed illuminate the crux of the piece at the end, where Nan comes back and the husband is right in the middle, under the ball of a blanket and a pillow. The fact that they can't both sleep soundly in bed, except when she leaves and he's passed out, says so much in so little, especially with the prayer at the end, which resonated with me after my initial read.

All in all, Carver masters "Show, Don't Tell," in this piece. (As I'm sure he does in all of his pieces.) Specifically with the student's wife, Carver achieves this with his dialogue that runs all throughout the piece, as well as his invention with the dream and the reminiscing of the lake. Both of these aspects are accented by Carver's sensory appeal and earnest all throughout.

Lynn Emanuel's "Photograph of Ramona Posing"

Emily Hughes

October 7, 2014

Lynn Emanuel's poem presents a unique dichotomy, juxtaposing sensual physicality with innocent and childlike ignorance. This comparison is immediately constructed within the poem's first sentence, when Emanuel describes the Father "Smudging the nipple with his thumb / In the tough, awkward way / Children rub their eyes when tired." The creation of Ramona's character, emphasized through this charcoal sketch imagery, is somehow erotic and juvenile simultaneously.

Later in the poem, Ramona is described as "This girl whose gold tooth / Father polished with his tongue" -- an aggressively lustful image. However, this vividly repulsive image is contrasted by the following line, in which Emanuel writes that Ramona could "fill the fields with weeping painters" -- a heavily romanticized description.

This dichotomy is all structured using the repeated phrase: "Life is not pretty / Although she does not believe it." These two lines assert a sort of forced innocence to Emanuel's Ramona; they provide her with a deliberately contradicting character. By creating this strong opposition of images, Lynn Emanuel is able to paint a more real and vivid character.

"Cherrylog Road" by James Dickey

The first thing I liked about this poem was the structure of it. It looked like a tower of bricks stacked across the pages. I read them much too quickly though, assuming a straightforward structure would indicate straightforward narrative. Instead I found a very mobile piece that took me for a ride off Highway 106 and into an unfamiliar lot. I wasn't able to keep up with the ride at first, but when I took my foot off the throttle I was able to appreciate the piece much more. Dickey is very successful in showing the reader the emotions of the narrator by way of his actions and language.

What I found most interesting about this piece was the live Dickey imbued the junkyard with. In fact, he even uses it to impart the movement of the live characters, describing how the inhabitants of the yard move to parallel the intimacies of the narrator and Doris Holbrook.