Hello I need help with my essay. Here is the close reading skills with a poem. ESSAY COMPONENTS: Your essay should be based solely on your own close reading and interpretation of a poem or short story. No outside sources are allowed. Please use standard MLA formatting. Title: Create a clever and/or descriptive title. I love a good title, so please do NOT title your essay, Close Reading Essay. Epigraph: Begin your essay with an epigraph, which is a full quote of the short passage (or stanzas) you will focus on. Introduction and Thesis Statement: Your first paragraph should introduce the poem/short story as a whole to the reader. Try to keep summary to a bare minimum, and assume that your reader is already familiar with the story/poem. Your thesis statement (typically the last sentence of the first paragraph) makes an interpretive claim about the poem/story that grows out of your close reading of a short section of the text. Detailed Close Reading Section: This is the most important section of your essay. Close reading involves a fair amount of speculation and associations. Be sure to connect each interpretative claim you make to the specific part of the text that you analyzed. Consider multiple meanings depending on how you interpret each significant word. Conclusion: Whole Part Whole (with new understanding) THE POEM IS : To live in the borderlands means you are neither , half-breed caught in the crossfire between camps while carrying all five races on your back not knowing which side to turn to, run from; To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the in you, betrayed for 500 years, is no longer speaking to you, that call you , that denying the Anglo inside you is as bad as having denied the Indian or Black; people walk through you, the wind steals your voice, youre a , scapegoat, forerunner of a new race, half and halfboth woman and man, neither a new gender; To live in the Borderlands means to put in the borscht, eat whole wheat , speak Tex-Mex with a Brooklyn accent; be stopped by at the border checkpoints; Living in the Borderlands means you fight hard to resist the gold elixir beckoning from the bottle, the pull of the gun barrel, the rope crushing the hollow of your throat; In the Borderlands you are the battleground where enemies are kin to each other; you are at home, a stranger, the border disputes have been settled the volley of shots have shattered the truce you are wounded, lost in action dead, fighting back; To live in the Borderlands means the mill with the razor white teeth wants to shred off your olive-red skin, crush out the kernel, your heart pound you pinch you roll you out smelling like white bread but dead; To survive the Borderlands you must live be a crossroads.
