Child in Red by Rainer Maria Rilke... One of my personal favorites

Sometimes she walks through the village in her


little red dress

all absorbed in restraining herself,

and yet, despite herself, she seems to move

according to the rhythm of her life to come.



She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,

half-turns around...

and, all while dreaming, shakes her head

for or against.



Then she dances a few steps

that she invents and forgets,

no doubt finding out that life

moves on too fast.



It's not so much that she steps out

of the small body enclosing her,

but that all she carries in herself

frolics and ferments.



It's this dress that she'll remember

later in a sweet surrender;

when her whole life is full of risks,

the little red dress will always seem right.

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

This is one of my favorite poems. I love how fearless and unashamedly honest she is. I love the gruesome imagery. I think it's marvelous how she uses shock to force people to comprehend what she's going through. For her time period, this was absolutely radical. You can listen to Plath actually reading this poem if you go to this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esBLxyTFDxE

I have done it again.

One year in every ten
I manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
0 my enemy.
Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.


Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart----
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a beautifully crafted masterpiece with a plot that can never be summed up in brief. It is a novel about life, love, and coming of age in a place where you're not always appreciated for who you are. It takes place in Brooklyn obviously, but during a time when the whole country was scurrying around looking for money. The main character Francie grows up in the novel and takes the role as the protagonist. Readers fall in love with her instantly and will not put this book down until it's finished.- Kim

"From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood...On the day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived."

"Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere-be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost."

"She was made up of all of these good and these bad things...She was the books she read in the library...Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk...She was all of these things and of something more...It was something that had been born into her and her only."

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

  Merriam- Webster’s online dictionary defines the word shame as the painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, and ridiculous, etc., done by oneself or another. Toni Morrison takes this definition further in her famous novel The Bluest Eye by illustrating it in the dynamics of her characters. Each character in the story is affected by shame in one way or another and each character is weakened by not dealing with it, so much so that the love they give to each other and themselves is greatly affected. Simply put, Toni Morrison uses The Bluest Eye as a vehicle to show readers how corrosive shame can be on love when it’s not dealt with. And thus, warns the reader to not provoke shame by way of racism or the pursuit for physical perfection.- Kim

"Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye."

"And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to stimulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the revelation and the word."

"The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap green days, walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach- could not even see- but which filled the valleys of the mind.

We tried to see her without looking at her, and never, never went near. Not because she was absurd, or because we were frightened, but because we had failed her. Our flowers never grew. I was convinced Frieda was right, that I had planted them too deeply. How could I have been so solven? So we avoided Pecola Breedlove-forever."
 
The Bluest Eye can be found at any legitimate bookstore for approximately 10 dollars. Go out and buy it.