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Analysis Of Fortune's Bones By Marilyn Nelson

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I was instantly intrigued when I saw that the book Fortune’s Bones was about a slave that worked for a doctor in Connecticut. The author Marilyn Nelson takes Fortune’s story and tells it in a way I would have never thought to. She creates poems from the perspectives of Fortune and the people in his life. She also has pages and pictures to go along with the poems that provide important background information. She tells the story of how Fortune’s bones were unknown for a long time and how they came to be found. Before I picked up this book I had never heard of the story of Fortune. The first page provides a small overview of his life in Connecticut and his family. The first poem in the book is titled “Preface.” As the first poem, it is …show more content…

Porter’s wife, Lydia. Dr. Porter was Fortune’s owner and when he died, left Dinah to Lydia. Dinah tells the story of having to clean the remains of her husband’s body because Lydia is afraid. Dinah explains how heart wrenching it is to see the man who once held her and took care of her. The poem is sad, it is almost physically hard to read. The words allow you to feel how alone Dinah felt. The lines that begin with “to dust” are so powerful because they start with something lifeless and compare it to the living. The contrast is striking and allows the reader to never forget that Fortune was a real man, and has now been diminished to only bones. That is a technique that I would want to use in my poems because it was very effective in driving the …show more content…

Porters perspective. He is telling the story of how he took apart Fortune’s body. He attributes all the work that Fortune did and is now still doing. The doctor describes the body in such an appreciative way. He describes seeing the body and what it has to offer beneath the skin as “Standing on a new continent.” This part of the story made me feel like I was intruding on something not meant for me. The doctor does say that it is intimate, and it feels that way. There is nothing left of Fortune to hide. The line, “I enter Fortune, and he enters me” is a great line in describing how entering the body will fill the doctors

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