How Long She'll Last in This World

With knowledge of both nature and biology, Maria Melendez creates poetry that touches upon different topics, such as life, nature and grief. Maria Melendez has a special way of portraying the natural world and how she experiences it. For me, reading poetry does not always come easily. Some of the poems in the text had to be read two or three times to get the entire concept. Some poems I had to read twice to make sure that I was right about the topic of the poem. Some of Melendez's poems were about labor or her children, comparing them to nature. Maria Melendez attempts to intertwine our lives with nature as well in her poems.

There are a few poems that have to do with big topics as well, such as a poem about the terrorist attacks in NYC, or 9/11. There is even a poem about the death of Matthew Shepard. It wasn't until I had done a little bit of research that I had realized what the poems were about. Without the research, I would not have realized what the poems were really about. The poem about 9/11 is titled "American Adhaan." There is a lot of imagery in this poem to describe the ashes coming from the Twin Towers: "the slow are'e stokes of great egret's wings deny the crude thickness of this air."