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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What name for the Mojave people does the speaker share in "The First Water Is the Body"?

2. In "The Cure for Melancholy Is to Take the Horn," what Russian-American poet is quoted?

3. In "I, Minotaur," the speaker uses the word "Minotauromachy." Where does this word come from?

4. In "Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera," how does the speaker's brother respond to her description of the cranes' dance?

5. In "Waist and Sway," the passage in which jackdaws wait on the garden walls compares the lover to what?

Short Essay Questions

1. Explain the metaphor "Transubstantiation bone--hips of bread,/ wine-whet thighs" in "Ode to the Beloved's Hips" (37).

2. In "exhibits from The American Water Museum," what is depicted in the "Photograph from a South American newspaper," and what is its significance?

3. In "Cranes, Mafiosos, and a Polaroid Camera," what does the speaker try to tell her brother about cranes, and what is its thematic significance?

4. In "exhibits from The American Water Museum," what does the guidebook say?

5. What is the setting of "Waist and Sway," and how is its setting unusual for this collection?

6. In "Isn't the Air Also a Body, Moving?" what leads the speaker to call the train caboose the best part of a train?

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

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

9. In "Ode to the Beloved's Hips," what metaphorical comparison is developed in the lines, "How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed/ Trinity?" (37)?

10. In "Grief Work," what is the symbolic significance of the poem's final sequence in which the speaker and her beloved are in the river?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay that traces the development of the "bull" motif in Postcolonial Love Poem. Show how different poems develop differing aspects of this motif and make a claim about its overall meaning within the collection.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay in which you explore the motif of "thirst" in Postcolonial Love Poem. What is the source of the speaker's thirst, and how does she seek to quench that thirst? Provide support from at least five of the collection's poems.

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay that analyzes Diaz's use of both high- and low-cultural references in Postcolonial Love Song. Use textual evidence from at least five separate poems as support for your claims.

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