Alice Alice is a former girlfriend of Jamie’s, who once agreed to marry him if he would change. During the summer of 1977, Alice moves in with Jamie, Jamie’s mother, and Tom. According to Jamie, she has an IQ of 165 and, while they lived together in his mother’s house, she needed to have sex…
Tag: The United States of America
Animal Stories by Jason Brown – Summary
“Animal Stories” opens with Jamie rushing to the hospital because he has just found out that his mother has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He notes that he drives recklessly, which he gets from his mother. “Any man’s mother is a source of grief until she dies,” he says. Jamie arrives at the hospital…
My Mother Pieced Quilts – Analysis
The poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” was published in 1976 at the beginning of a renaissance of Mexican-American (also referred to as Chicana [for female authors]) literary creativity. This renaissance did not reflect the female authors’ sudden burst of creativity, for there always were women writing, but rather it reflects the sudden willingness on the…
My Mother Pieced Quilts – Themes
Kinship/Motherhood Teresa Palomo Acosta’s poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” stitches together pieces of memory, history, and tradition to create a poem, much as her mother once stitched together pieces of old dresses, work clothes, and nightgowns to create a quilt. In the poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” the speaker reflects on images of her mother,…
My Mother Pieced Quilts – Meaning – Annotation
Lines 1–4 Acosta begins the poem at the most literal level, introducing the quilts and how they were used: for warmth against winter chill. Using a metaphor, she describes the quilts as “weapons” against “pounding january winds,” perhaps the way a young child would imagine them during the coldest of winter nights. Lines 5–7 Here…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Analysis
Critics seemed unable to pigeonhole e. e. cummings. He was a man of many moods—some caustic and full of ridicule, others quiet and contemplative. The themes of his poetry were just as likely to be influenced by politics and social affairs as by sexuality and love. But one recurring theme that cummings seems to have…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Rhyme Scheme – Poetic Devices
“Maggie and milly and molly and may” is written in the tone and style of a nursery rhyme and is marked by both its skillful use of alliteration and its complex end-line and internal rhymes. Nursery rhymes do not all share a single poetic form or meter, but they are generally marked by their use…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Themes
The poem “maggie and milly and molly and may” represents one of e. e. cummings’s experiments with rhymed couplets. True to his disregard for formal rules of writing, cummings does not rhyme every couplet in this poem. It is also a perfect and, on the surface, simplistic expression of his belief that the outer self…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Summary
Line 1 Here the speaker of the poem introduces the four characters. Notice how the repetition of the “m” sound in each of the girls’ names gives this line a musical quality, like a melody, and makes it sound like a nursery rhyme. Such repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words is called…
Having A Coke With You – Analysis
Frank O’Hara’s love poem “Having a Coke with You,” written to his lover Vincent Warren, takes as its theme the function of aesthetics. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that concerns beauty and taste. Questions it attempts to answer include: what makes art, art?; why do we like some kinds of art and not others?;…