"Notebooks of a Chile Verde Smuggler"-J.F. Herrera (1-29) QR

"Step ahead, be careful - the ice, you can slip." (Herrera 6)
-The way the author says this at the beginning of his poem about dropping his burdens is kindof a way of warning the reader. It makes the reader feel what hes feeling, that life is constantly on the edge, never stable. You could always fall, something could always go wrong. It gives the reader a heads up in a way for his poem to come, like the power of it is so great you might fall and slip into it like on ice. It also sets a tone of caution, of unpredicatability, of spontaneaity to the poem that you wouldnt feel without this line at the beginning.

"I worry about smiling obituaries...I worry about monolingual emergency signs..." (Herrera 28)
-This is part of a poem where the author simply lists over and over again "I worry..." and then whatever one of the things he worries about is. The funny thing about this poem is that much of it makes alot of sense. He worries about things that shouldn't happen, or that if they happen are probably worth paying attention to. The two worries above are good examples. Why would an obituary smile? To him that is something that you should be worried about, a person that spends all their time with dead people, yet smiles anyway. Monolingual emergency signs are also a worry because if they're monolingual some people will not understand them and therefore possibly be hurt, or is that for a reason??? He asks alot of indirect questions that have logical obvious answers but just are not thought of as important because they are so normal....or not ridiculously strange.