Death

The two poems that I chose to discuss were "Encounter" by Czeslaw Milosz and "Slowly" by Donna Masini. Both of these poems are similar because they both discuss the topic of death. Both of these deaths that occurred had little affect over the author writing about them because they knew very little about the dying object.

In "Encounter", the man that had died was simply an encounter. She did not know him very well. She had just met him, and was just a fling that didn't mean much. In "Slowly", it was just some rabbit that the little boy saw at the zoo. It wasn't like a pet or anything. He saw him for a split second and then he was gone. Both of these poems illustrate how something that can make you so happy and then goes downhill and makes you sad. You never know a good thing till it's gone. Another similarity between these two is that there is a rabbit that dies in both poems. And in both poems the rabbit is there and then is quickly gone.

At the end of "Slowly", the author says "How slow the body is to realize. You are never coming back." I think this statement applies as well to "Encounter" where author is reminiscing and is just now realizing that she is growing older and many of the people from her past are passing away. She didn't think about that before. Because when you're young, the thought of your friends dying doesn't even cross your mind. But now she is coming to terms with reality.

"Ever After"

"Ever After" by Joyce Sutphen caused the most curiosity for me. The author never tells the readers what happened to their marriage that caused a divorce. This makes me really want to know what happened. I know the author just wants to leave her audience with some kind of mystery, but I don't want to wonder. I want to know exactly what happened.

The author questions what she means to her ex-husband now that they are not together anymore. If she's asking this, she obviously still cares about what he thinks about her. So maybe she did something to make her husband divorce her. Did she cheat on him? Were they in a fight?

The two were obviously once in love if they had gotten married. So something really big must have happened to make all that love just stop. At the end of the poem, the author talks about their wedding cake and how their were so many layers over and over again. Which makes me think she is implying that maybe they were fighting a lot and there were many different layers to their marriage. Maybe the layers symbolize fights they had. It was one fight, and then the next, and then back to the first one again. But I still have to wonder what exactly were they fighting about?

My Response to Stitches: A Memoir

In the novel Stitches: A Memoir written by David Small, the author used many different ways to tell his story to his audience, one of the ways that caught my attention was his extended use of graphics. Small would fill several pages of just complete illustration to get his point across to his readers about how he felt and how others made him feel. Using pictures to tell his story with very little words was a great way to communicate with his audience. Readers can relate to pictures because we already make up our own little story in our heads of what we think the people in the novel look like, but with all the illustrations we are able to actually see the different emotions in the character's faces and how the author remembers them.

Being human, I think we are naturally more drawn to pay more attention to pictures than words. So any kind of graphics would command your attention. But with these kinds of pictures we get to peek inside of David's head and see what he really thinks about. As a child, David was never really allowed to express himself to others. The only thing he had was his artwork and his thoughts. I liked how crazy some of his thoughts were and how he perceived things. David's head was the one place where he could think about what he wanted and nobody could judge him for it. We also see throughout the story how his thoughts change and they mature more from when he was a child. Like in the beginning of the story when he was a child and he sees the fetus in a jar at the hospital, he thinks it's a little man chasing him. But when he's an adult he goes back and realizes that it is just a normal fetus in a jar.

The author's use of graphics was definitely my favorite part about this novel. It kept my attention throughout the whole story. I think even without the words and just the illustration, readers would still understand what the author went through in his life and grasp exactly how he felt.