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    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter"
    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter"
    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter"
    Ebook38 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535840743
    A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter"

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      A Study Guide for Cathy Song's "The Youngest Daughter" - Gale

      13

      The Youngest Daughter

      Cathy Song

      1983

      Introduction

      The Youngest Daughter, by Cathy Song, is a five-stanza poem of fifty-two lines. This poem was first published in 1980 and is included in Song's debut 1983 collection Picture Bride. It appears in a section titled Black Iris, which refers to a specific painting by Georgia O'Keeffe, a twentieth-century American artist who is celebrated for the beauty and complexity of her floral paintings. Each of the five different sections of Picture Bride is named after a different O'Keeffe painting. The collection received the 1982 Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

      The Youngest Daughter is a monologue, spoken by the youngest daughter in a family, who is required to care for her aging mother. The poem includes themes of love and pity, the debilitating effects of aging, and the speaker's resentment at being obligated to care for her mother. The speaker's desire to escape is never far from her mind, as Song balances the neediness of the mother with the daughter's own needs: when the daughter suffers a migraine, her mother massages her face to ease the pain. In this case, the mother and daughter provide reciprocal comfort and caring.

      Author Biography

      Song was born on August 20, 1955, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father, Andrew Song, was a Korean American airline pilot. Song's mother, Ella, was a Chinese American seamstress. The family lived on the island of Oahu and traveled frequently when Song was a young child. She wrote short stories for fun, and she began writing poetry when attending Kalani High School in Honolulu. After graduation, she enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for two years before transferring to Wellesley College, in Massachusetts. Song continued to write poetry as a student at Wellesley, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1977. She continued her studies at Boston College and received a master of fine arts degree in creative writing in 1981.

      Much of Song's poetry is focused on her Korean-Chinese American heritage and her life in Hawaii. She is especially focused on the personal experiences of family, including interactions between parents and child and intergenerational relationships. These topics are common in all of her

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