Sexy - Jhumpa Lahiri

"Sexy" by Jhumpa Lahiri was a phenomenally powerful tale of how people deal with a spouse's infidelity, and the other member of the relationship looking for the same feeling outside of the original relationship.

The character of Mir

anda struggles with the fact that her husband followed a woman off of the plane that he was on when he was supposed to be heading home, leaving Miranda alone with herself. She meets a man named Devajit (Dev) and begins a new and exciting relationship with. She and Dev go from the thrill of the newness, the bickering and mediocrity and the begin of the decline of such a relationship, all the way to finding out that it isn't working out at all.

The central theme of the story as I see it though, is identity. Miranda hadn't identified herself as sexy since she had gotten married and felt even worse after her husband left her for a stranger on an airplane. When Dev began to call h

er sexy, she felt loved, beautiful, new, all over again. She was identified once again as something special. Sexy.

Dev, on the other hand is only identifying her as sexy because he knows he can get her to do anything when he says that. He never truly means what he tells Miranda, but she believes it. He identifies her as a mistress. Miranda does her best to keep her relationship with Dev, but it deteriorates because of Dev's waning interest in Miranda. A relationship is impossible to keep from falling apart if both parties are in it for different reasons. Along with the relationship as a whole, those identities also tend to decay, leaving people as single, and often incomplete. Miranda doesn't let that happen to her. Her relationship with Dev proved to her that men still find her attractive and to be a woman of great beauty, and she is able to tell herself once again that SHE is sexy.

Persimmons - Li-Young Lee

To Lee when he is young, persimmons and precision are simply two words he mixes up, but as he ages, persimmons are synonymous with precision.

"How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart."

Realizing that the selection of a persimmon is the essence of precision, he sees that words that are given specific, individual meaning when we are young are sometimes things we associate with one another when we're older. He does this with other words: Fight and flight, wren and yarn. Their meanings then are far more concrete than the meanings we give them now.

The world of the memory is what Lee is examining in "Persimmons". He is showing how things can change as we age and as we remember them. Things we give meaning to in our memories can often change the way we see them in the time we find ourselves in now. Finding this balance of past and present is what keeps those memories alive and so important to us as who we are. We can't let the things that change the way we think disappear from our memories. Persimmons are precision. Memories can be the defining moments that shape what we believe if we let them.

Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath

Plath's romanticizing suicide is part of what made her so famous, but why did she write about it so much? It is widely known that she attempted suicide numerous times in her life, the final attempt being successful, but what made her so volatile?

Experts say that a lot of her behaviour is rooted in her distain for her father's untimely death. She was only 8 years old when he passed and she was left with feelings of abandonment and she took his death personally, as if he meant for her to feel pain from his passing.

She often makes reference to her German heritage (from her father's side), much of the references being right in the middle of Lady Lazarus.

"A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot  A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen..."

Plath feels that she is being somehow persecuted by her father (who is of German decent), seeing him as a German officer and her as a Jewish person, his victim.  In a sense she is rejecting him as relative to her, saying in a way, that she is not a part of him, except for how he hurt her.

A large part of her desire to die came from feelings of a

bandonment, and her wonder with the world of killing one's self is demonstrated in "Lady Lazarus" as much as her reasons for her attempts.  The saddest part of all of this is that a few short months after she wrote this poem, she finally succeeded on her fourth attempt to take her own life at the young age of 30.