Vievee Francis Still Life In Yellow Syntax

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In “Still Life in Yellow with Browns and Blacks”, Vievee Francis uses irregular syntax to talk about racism in Texas and the hardships that a black girl faced while living in Texas. The irregular syntax in “Still Life in Yellow with Browns and Blacks” mimics the context of the poem and it also makes the poem more fast-paced. In the lines that Francis chooses to use regular syntactic structures slows the poem down. Throughout the book Francis plays with sentence structure and punctuation as a way of setting the tone of the poem and changing the speed of the poem. This is apparent in poems such as “Say It Any Way You Can” and “Fishing Hole”. In those poems Francis uses little to no punctuation and plays and the spaces in the lines. In the