Magic City was written with the purpose of explaining a black boy’s coming of age and trying to understand the world around him, while growing up in 1950s Louisiana. In each poem Yusef Komunakaa shows the reader snapshots of the narrator’s life and the steps of losing innocence while becoming an adult. He does an excellent job of creating a childlike honesty through out the book. The author creates such brilliant poems that unite to make a holistic view of a young boys’ life. Komunyakaa uses many types of writing styles to help show the narrators life for example metaphors, irony, motifs, and imagery. Each story teaches the boy a valuable lesson in life Venus’s-flytraps teach innocence, Sunday Afternoons teaches optimism and hope, Glory teaches accepting the pleasant moments, Smokehouse teaches him about death, and My Father’s Love Letters teaches him about being a man.
Venus’s-flytraps sets the tone for the rest of the book. The narrator is a five year old boy playing outside and telling the reader his experience. There is no hesitation in the reader’s mind that the narrator is a young boy. The poem is written in present tense, giving the allusion that this narrator is actually thinking and see the images in the poem. The narrator mentions seeing a cow get trampled by the train as if it was just an inconsequential fleeting moment, giving the appearance of apathy in the young child. Ironically he then discusses standing to close to the tracks, and even though the men on the train tell him to stand further back he does not, …show more content…
The narrator explains that he was in a hazy world because he did not full understand the things around him and he was constantly in a would that was not fully real, a day dream. He was a wizard because he could create his own world to play in, but after understand death he was awakened. When he cut the helpless pigs, the realization that he is in control of another life as well as his
Venus’s-flytraps sets the tone for the rest of the book. The narrator is a five year old boy playing outside and telling the reader his experience. There is no hesitation in the reader’s mind that the narrator is a young boy. The poem is written in present tense, giving the allusion that this narrator is actually thinking and see the images in the poem. The narrator mentions seeing a cow get trampled by the train as if it was just an inconsequential fleeting moment, giving the appearance of apathy in the young child. Ironically he then discusses standing to close to the tracks, and even though the men on the train tell him to stand further back he does not, …show more content…
The narrator explains that he was in a hazy world because he did not full understand the things around him and he was constantly in a would that was not fully real, a day dream. He was a wizard because he could create his own world to play in, but after understand death he was awakened. When he cut the helpless pigs, the realization that he is in control of another life as well as his