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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In "Ode to the Beloved's Hips," what technique is employed in the phrase "How many hours bowed" (37)?
(a) Eye rhyme.
(b) Amplification.
(c) Conundrum.
(d) Assonance.

2. In "Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?" what power does the speaker ascribe to the air?
(a) The power to spread emotion from person to person.
(b) The power to dry out the land.
(c) The power to give life.
(d) The power to tell us what we are.

3. In "How the Milky Way Was Made," what does the speaker claim causes the milky appearance of the galaxy?
(a) Sparks from the sun.
(b) The quivering of her lover's body.
(c) Dust from the moon.
(d) The movement of fish.

4. In "That Which Cannot Be Stilled," what American poet's death is mentioned?
(a) Walt Whitman.
(b) Elizabeth Bishop.
(c) John Ashbery.
(d) Robert Frost.

5. In "How the Milky Way Was Made," how many dams does the speaker say "shatter" the Colorado (61)?
(a) 15.
(b) 3.
(c) 11.
(d) 18.

Short Answer Questions

1. In "My Brother, My Wound," to what does the speaker compare the light in the holes in the walls?

2. In "The First Water Is the Body," what word does the speaker borrow from John Berger?

3. In "Waist and Sway," to what type of building is the beloved compared?

4. In "It Was the Animals," what does the speaker want to do that her brother stops her from doing?

5. In "exhibits from The American Water Museum," what does the speaker say is the "first violence against any body of water" (64)?

Short Essay Questions

1. In "It Was the Animals," who comes to the speaker's house, and what is that person carrying?

2. In "My Brother, My Wound," how is light used metaphorically?

3. In "The First Water Is the Body," what point does the speaker make about the limitations of words?

4. In "Snake-Light," what comparison does the speaker make between snakes and writing?

5. In "Ode to the Beloved's Hips," what is the rhetorical function of the lines: "I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock/ right now" (37)?

6. In "It Was the Animals," what does the speaker's guest tell her the inscription is, and what is it in reality?

7. In the opening of "Snake-Light," what does the speaker literally see in the desert, and to what does she compare it?

8. In "How the Milky Way Was Made," what does the speaker say about Coyote?

9. In "Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera," what does the speaker's brother request, and why?

10. What two conceits are central to "If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert"?

(see the answer keys)

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