Push, By Sapphire

"Greensleeves" by Alan Spence is a short story describing the life of an elderly lady living alone on the top floor of high rise flats in Glasgow. Spence creates a character readers feel sympathy for through isolation and lonliness, themes that run prominently throughout the story.

If you ever wanted to get revenge on people who have wronged you, then you may be able to relate to Mr. Chiu, the main character in the short story “Saboteur” by Ha Jin. Mr. Chiu’s revenge is ironic as the conflicts he finds himself in throughout the story.

Listening is ‘Not an attempt to understand something that is being said’ but ‘Just an attention to the activity of sounds’

Under the lights by Abbie Glines. There are three teens that grew up together in a southern small town. Willa’s mom had her when she was a teenager. Willa had gotten into some trouble at a young age and had to stay with her Nonna. Willa’s two best friends were Gunner and Brady. Willa has made some bad choices in her past life which made her go down the wrong path in life. Brady’s a high school quarter back now and with the choices Willa has made Brady sees Willa as a different person. Gunner is also a football star in high school. Gunner is living a good rich life the only matter though he cares about himself only, except for Willa. He understands the person she has grown into over her time. As they were known to be child hood friends secrets start to come out and the truth may be the reason of them losing each other.

Jealousy is the key factor that pushes us to do better or it can overpower our thinking abilities because we want to be the best, so we don’t think about how it can affect the people around us. This is exactly what happens in the story, “MVP,” by Clare Mishica. Derek wants to be the most valuable player on his basketball team instead of Cole so much that he forgets to be a team player. When Cole gets hurt, Derek realizes how much more important the trophy and being a part of the team is than getting MVP. Teamwork is always more efficient than trying to achieve something individually because a person can do very little alone, but together we can accomplish a lot. The saying, “Two heads are better than one,” goes along with this perfectly.

Within “SPEAK,” Laurie Halse Anderson uses Melinda’s artwork to express Melinda. At the Beginning of the story Melinda gets a year long art project to draw a tree. At the beginning, she struggles because she is still feeling pain and depression from getting raped. But, Throughout the story, she slowly grows and comes out of her “shell,” and becomes better and better with it; So by the

Michael Gow's play, "Away" expresses the idea of going through changes and receiving help from people around you. The key characters of the play experiences change and renewal as a result of their relationships with others ad the summer vacation. Coral and Gwen is two characters that undergo the most changes throughout the trip. Coral manage to moved on from her's son death while Gwen changed from a snobby person to a person who is more understandable. Tom is one of the critical character that help Coral and Gwen realised their issues and surpasses it. The play showed lives of people and their own struggle during the 60s and how they overcome it.

The book Interpreter of the Maldives is a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri that examines the relationship between Indian and American culture. Lahiri does this by using motifs, patterns and themes that recur throughout the short stories. The relationship between the two cultures is not only evident in romantic relationships of Indian-Americans, but in Lahiri’s description of clothing. Lahiri's description of clothing in the short stories, Sexy, This Blessed House and the Third and Final Continent, show how well a character is adapting/accepting American culture.

So we ask ourselves, how does poetry gain its power? To answer this question, we examine the work of poets Harwood and Plath. ‘The Glass Jar’, composed by Gwen Harwood portrays its message through the emotions of a young child, while the poem ‘Ariel’, written by Sylvia Plath, makes effective use of emotions to convey artistic creativity and inspiration.

The novel that I have decided to make a report on is the book Ashfall by Mike Mullin. My reaction to the book Ashfall was "Wow, Alex is really brave". If I was in his situation , I don't think I would have reacted the way he reacted. Alex took control and focused on one thing and that was finding his family.

“Magic Mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” the Evil Queen inquiries (1). In the novella Ethan Frome, Mattie Silver (Snow White) surpasses the beauty of every living organism in Starkfield. Zenobia Frome correlates herself with the Evil Queen. Furthermore, Zeena, a hypochondriac in the eyes of Ethan Frome, is used as a foil for Mattie Silver. In the dark and gloomy tale of Ethan Frome, the story emerges as an inverted fairytale. The “fairy maiden” anthropomorphizes into a greater evil than the Evil Queen, herself. Snow White was known for her pale skin, red lips, and her beautiful voice. Alike Snow White, Edith Wharton sedulously attaches red and light with Mattie Silver, symbolizing her with a red scarf. Ethan Frome and Zeena are associated with dark and grim colors blending in with their haggard surroundings. Ethan is in awe when he sees Mattie, his silver lining. Zeena envies Mattie indirectly in the story and goes out of her way to make her seem like a horrendous person. Moreover, Zeena emerges as the powerful Evil Queen in Ethan Frome that successfully wins. Thus, in Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton taints the classic fairytale to become a disastrous tragedy of two lovers.

There are many songs that can have can absolute value to an individual and at the same time be another persons “habitus” with relative value. The song I have chosen to analyze is “Promise”, by Romeo Santos featuring Usher. This song portrays such a situation. This specific song is one in which I self-consciously fell in love with no particular reason other then the fact that I love the music and the lyrics. In this essay I will be discussing how “Promise” can resemble absolute value to me but can be somebody else’s “habitus”, I will also brush upon DeNora’s concept of “aesthetic reflexivity” and how “promise” plays a huge role in it.

Akin to intersectional romance fiction, poetry is equivalently as radical. Poetry magnifies the significance of language as a revolutionary tool, one that liberates women and cultivates an environment in which women are free to address their aspirations and anxieties while condemning the ideals of a society that operates under the canons of male chauvinism. In a collection of letters published as a tribute to the late Audre Lorde in Off Our Backs, a feminist newspaper journal written for women by women, one anonymous contributor discusses how Lorde “encourages all women to find their own means of expression, their own poetry to value and to use” (Tyler 32) in her piece “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. In the piece, Lorde discusses how for women, poetry is not a nonessential indulgence, as Caucasian men throughout history have suggested through how they render poetry as an opportunity to “cover [a] desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde contends that poetry is a “vital necessity of [the] existence” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36) of women because it establishes the infrastructure on which women “predicate [their] hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde’s text motivates women to exercise “the power of the word, a freedom for women greatly feared by…patriarchal society” (Tyler 32). Lorde states the poetry

Teju Cole’s phenomenally written original novel majorly takes place in New York City. Cole character was easy to relate to because of his Nigerian American decent being that I am a Ghanaian American. Cole is a Nigerian American. He was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992 at the age of seventeen. Cole is also well educated and is a graduate student at Columbia University. I found it insightful how in the novel Cole met several various types of people, including other immigrants. He met and shared stories with a Haitian shoe shiner, at work in Penn Station; a Liberian, imprisoned for over two years in a dentition center in Queens; and a Moroccan student working at an Internet café. I enjoyed the fact that the narrator was well stocked minded. He touched on the topics of art, music, and interesting books. He had a very eclectic set of interest.

Analyzing the word, "beautiful" in this stanza, one should perceive that she is not actually singing about the outside of her, but what she consists of emotionally and mentally on the inside. She reveals that her thoughts and emotions are of worth and value and they are of her opinion. They are consumed through her, and no one else and if anyone disagrees, she does not take that into affect. Her diction is actually pretty precise. To quote a famous cliché, beauty is not skin deep. She explains that the beauty is the sentiment.