{"id":12932,"date":"2018-06-19T14:52:37","date_gmt":"2018-06-19T18:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/?page_id=12932"},"modified":"2018-08-22T16:28:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T20:28:21","slug":"lazaro-instructor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/journal\/past-issues\/issue-10\/lazaro\/lazaro-instructor\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Instructor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The final project for WR 150 \u201cPoetry Now\u201d asked students to translate some aspect of their academic research paper into a collection of poems for a non-academic audience. A caveat was that the poems present a sufficient argument or aesthetic experience, such that readers of the poems need not have also read the research paper for the poems to make sense. Hallie Lazaro more than rose to this challenge. Her research focused on the cultural silences and hidden shames surrounding gender discrimination and immigration, as these topics are depicted in Monica Ong\u2019s highly visual poetry collection, <em>Silent Anatomies.\u00a0<\/em>Hallie\u2019s poetry project uses Ong\u2019s book as a model both for creating meaningful intersections between words and images and for contextualizing family history in a larger narrative.<\/p>\n<p>In \u201cThe Life Cycle of a Tree: A Cultural Journey,\u201d Hallie\u2019s stylistic choices and varied forms reveal how immigration is a constant and complicated navigation for Lazaro, the narrator based upon her father. Slight linguistic variations enact large emotional shifts, as in the first poem where the meaning of <em>Lazaro, <\/em>\u201cHelp of God,\u201d becomes a plea: \u201cLazaro is foreign soil on the tongue. \/ Wet and choking. \/ God help Lazaro.\u201d Hallie\u2019s poems also present powerful\u00a0images. In \u201cGrowth\u201d a Narra tree grows from Lazaro\u2019s back, a metaphor for the difficulty of assimilation. In the next stanza we see how otherness is often pathologized: Lazaro\u2019s doctor \u201cprescribed [him] an axe and \/ told [him] to cut down [the tree] and bury it \/ in the backyard.\u201d As I re-read \u201cThe Life Cycle of a Tree,\u201d I was struck by how timely these poems are. When the very humanity of immigrants is being questioned and reduced by the language of policies such as \u201ccatch and release,\u201d we need texts like Hallie\u2019s to remind us that immigration always involves a specific individual\u2019s experiences.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2014\u00a0JESSICA BOZEK<\/strong><br \/>\n<span>WR 150: Poetry Now<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The final project for WR 150 \u201cPoetry Now\u201d asked students to translate some aspect of their academic research paper into a collection of poems for a non-academic audience. A caveat was that the poems present a sufficient argument or aesthetic experience, such that readers of the poems need not have also read the research paper [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":0,"parent":12907,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12932"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13145,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12932\/revisions\/13145"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}