Stanford and University of California alumni Sandra Lim reads from The Wilderness on April 7, 2015, at Prairie Lights. As an alumna from the International Writing Program Lim was making her return back to Iowa City after 11 years. In The Wilderness Lim reads a collection of poems about love, spring and one poem that caught my attention was about the individual struggle of one's body within one’s mind. The poems are open to many interpretations but that is the way that I chose to interpret that poetry in particular. The interesting thing about Lim’s poem is how describes the body parts in some of her poems. It is very vague. It almost makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable but at the same time, I really like her style. The way she describes…
The chapter 5 and chapter 6 and throughout chapter 8 of the book called, The House On Mango Street; represent an ethnic picture from both the past and the present of Mango Street and the surrounding neighborhood. Cathy, Esperanza’s friend indicated what the neighborhood may have been like in the past, while the two families that moved into her house once Cathy’s left were more representative of the whole neighborhood as Esperanza came to experience it. Along the Mango Street lived the black man who was unwelcome from the rest of the neighborhood, different from the people Esperanza sees from day to day. This guy race makes him so unfamiliar that Esperanza is afraid to talk to him. Cathy has shown Esperanza the neighborhood’s two cultures, Latin American and American, and two languages, Spanish and English, which revealing the new cultural makeup of Mango Street. Cathy also provided a window into how outsiders view Esperanza’s neighborhood, even though Cathy is blind to her own family’s similarities to the families around them. Cathy’s family was moving because the neighborhood is “getting bad,” a racist reason that Esperanza immediately understands. Esperanza’s immigrant family, as well as other families like hers, was, in Cathy’s family’s view, causing the neighborhood to deteriorate, and the only thing to do was to move. However, Cathy’s family did not seem to be struggling any less than the other families in Esperanza’s neighborhood. Their house, which Cathy’s father…
‘The Waking’ is a contemporary jazz piece written by American vocalist, Kurt Elling, and features Theodore Roethke’s 1954 poem of the same title. Released in 2007 on the album Nightmoves, Elling uses musical techniques to enhance the message of Roethke’s poem. However, in order to understand the reasoning behind the devices Elling has used, the meaning of Roethke’s poem must first be discussed.…
The House on Mango Street is the “coming of age” story of a Mexican-American girl named Esperanza Cordero. The story covers a year in Esperanza's life starting with when she moved to the house on mango street. As the year progresses Esperanza grows emotionally and artistically, as the novel roams through her experience of life. Esperanza, her friends (Rachel, Lucy), and her sister Nenny have many adventures throughout the book. Esperanza has many life experiences including the art of poetry and music also the downsides of poverty and shame. Although the novel includes unforgettable men it also includes women who a trapped in many ways. For Example, Mamacita does not leave the apartment b/c she is afraid of the English language. Rafaela who…
1. Does the horse think, or is the writer using this to postpone his thoughts…
The House on Mango Street, written by Sandra Cisneros, is a growing up female novel written in the style of linked prose poems. The book displays the hardships of growing up as a Chicana while being surrounded by the pressure of the American dream. The main character Esperanza has trouble with her identity, but learns a lot of important lessons from the people around her as she matures. The struggles she faces are what creates her main quest of using her legacy to take control of her destiny. Esperanza sets herself many goals throughout her journey, and meets people who both help and hurt her, and eventually lead her to change her goals and overall outlook on…
The House on Mango street is a feminist piece of literature because it brings attentions to the sexist way the men in Esperanza’s society regard women. Esperanza tells her story by focusing on the women around her who are owned by the dominant men in their lives due to restricting gender roles that encompasses not only women but men. “My great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off...She (Esperanza’s grandmother) looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.” (11) Cisneros brings attention to the cruel way that men in Esperanza’s society treat women. The normality of these discriminatory actions describes a gender role that society has set for men, to be the dominant figure in…
In the book The House on Mango Street, author Sandra Cisneros presents a series of vignettes that involve a young girl, named Esperanza, growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Esperanza Cordero is searching for a release from the low expectations and restrictions that Latino society often imposes on its young women. Cisneros draws on her own background to supply the reader with accurate views of Latino society today. In particular, Cisneros provides the chapters "Boys and Girls" and "Beautiful and Cruel" to portray Esperanza's stages of growth from a questioning and curious girl to an independent woman. Altogether, "Boys and Girls" is not like "Beautiful and Cruel" because Cisneros reveals two different maturity levels in Esperanza; one of a wavering confidence with the…
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a series of 44 vignettes describing the adolescence of Esperanza. These 44 vignettes, though at some points seem unconnected and unrelated, come back to the central symbol of the house. The homes described are a symbol of poverty and shame as well as a symbol of imprisonment, and this symbol reveals Esperanza’s future aspirations and themes of spousal abuse.…
We come to life changing trials in our life, some may be a path that we are glad we did while others wished that we can go back and choose the other because of a negative result. In the poem written by Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken”, shows us that making a decision is not always easy. In the…
Many writers on their venture to becoming great, are faced with roadblocks. I too feel those stresses. When sitting down to begin a story, novel, or poem we all strive to be different. But as Baldwin explains, "there is no original thought, because we all humans think and feel has been thought and felt so many times before, by so many generations." This in itself makes starting writing a very daunting task. Not to mention the sea of fellow authors you are competing with for limited shelf space. A trip to a jam packed bookstore reiterates this feeling instantaneously. Really, what sets the writer apart is the original perspective and finding out what shape to give it to really hold the readers attention. This can all be achieved through the power in…
The House On Mango Street and “ Only Daughter” both prove that being an Mexican- American women is a struggle. As Cisneros shows her first hand experience, and as well shows it through story telling. Yet without telling a biography and going straight to the point she shows emotion by using literary elements. Sandra Cisneros Chose to use metaphors and imagery to express the hard ships of being a Mexican- American women. If Sandra Cisneros did not use literary elements to show the lifestyle of a Mexican-American women, the points that she showed in both the texts would not have been as powerful as they were.…
In The House on Mango Street, Cisneros depicts how the setting impacts the narrator by using language to show how the narrator's surrounding influenced her desires. At first the narrator was never one to be conscious of her social status as she was happy just being able to play around but that all changed after her interaction with the nun, “The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there… I knew then I had to have a real house” (paragraph 10-11).…
The works we studied within Creative Writing were all helpful in creating my own works to submit to the class. Throughout all of the reading, many of the works inspired me in different ways, whether it was short story plot ideas or word usage in the poems. While crafting my work for the final portfolio, I reviewed many of the poems from our poetry packet in an effort to find inspiration and to create new interesting images. I took the most inspiration for my formal poem, which I found most difficult to write. One of the poems that was most useful to me was Jilly Dybka’s “Memphis, 1976.” Dybka’s poem follows the sestina form; I also wrote my last poem in this form, so it helped to follow the form by looking at her poem as an example. Dybka’s…
The House on Mango Street is a beloved book spanning a great generation of readers. The House on Mango Street is a fictional story about the life of a young girl, Esperanza, growing up on Mango Street in a poor neighborhood. She grows up in a society where men are dominant over women. This shapes her in many ways, including her thoughts of men. Cisneros's use of syntax and figurative language, in the form of repetition and metaphors, alludes to the reader that if women allow themselves to be trapped by men's dreams, they forfeit their freedom, power, and independence.…