Axolotls are pink amphibians with black eyes, world of wonders meaning, and a human-like grin. One gazes serenely from the cover of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, lovingly painted by illustrator Fumi Mini Nakamura and nestled among a colourful collage of magnificent plants and animals, some familiar (flamingo, what is the meaning of what a wonderful world, monarch butterfly) and others unknown to me (potoo bird, ribbon eel, southern cassowary). Among this kaleidoscope of exotic species, the axolotl’s enigmatic, pink, Mona Lisa smile is an appealing hook, urging readers to pick up the book and discover the treasures contained within.
World of Wonders is entitled In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, and each of the collection’s small articles is like a prose praise song to one part of the natural world. The articles, however, transcend beyond love and thankfulness for the flora and creatures included. Each one combines facts on the species with anecdotes from the author’s life, with animals and plants serving as metaphors. Long-legged dancing college girls are pink flamingos, both Nezhukumatathil in the past and her pupils now. During his wide-awake and always-astonished early years, the ribbon eel, with its gaping, euphoric look, is her second son. Other wild animals act as protectors, projecting Nezhukumatathil’s superpowers into her mind. The catalpa tree’s large leaves provide protection from the bright Kansas sun and gazing Kansas eyes. A latch-key child finds safety from imagined perils in the nest of a cactus wren in a saguaro. The ability of the narwhal to dive deep provides her with an escape from a student on the school bus who makes racist remarks about her Filipino mother. The axolotl’s narrow, charming grin transforms into a tight smile in middle what does the seven wonders of the world of wonders meaning, when a white girl tells her what colour lipstick she can wear, and in adulthood, when a coworker subjected her to racial microaggressions.
Nezhukumatathil Is First And Foremost A Poet
(her poetry books include Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Miracle Fruit), and her poetic sensibilities permeate the essays with metaphor, repetition, rhythm, and alliteration. She describes colour as “the hue and cry of joy.” The flamingo dance consists of “legs akimbo, spindle-stick, and joint-backward steps from everything you know.” “In Mississippi, summer means mosquito,” she opens an article about the potoo bird. It also stands for tomatoes, mosquitoes, peaches, humidity, strawberries, and mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are the most common.”
World Of Wonders Meaning
like the axolotl, is brilliant, colourful, and totally lovely. It, like the axolotl, has a darker side. “And when it eats—what a wild mess—when it gathers a tangle of bloodworms into its mouth,” she writes of the clawed monster, “you will understand how a galaxy learns to spin in the dark, and how it begins to grow and grow.” We know we’re in good hands when she takes us from “wild mess” to whirling galaxies in the span of one sentence. In these articles, Nezhukumatathil weaves galaxies, generating planets of astonishment, moons of humour, suns of courage, and whole constellations of sadness. One of the most amazing facts about the axolotl is that it is extinct in the wild; one of its natal lakes was drained, and the other was overrun by carp. In the essay “Peacock,” she describes the cry of the eponymous bird as “cats being dragged over thumbtacks” and tells of the time her ecstatic work of drawing a peacock in “a sea of bright teal and purple” crayon was interrupted by the teacher as another example of this embracing of beauty, humour, and heartbreak. “Some of us will have to redo our drawings of American animals.” We live in Ah-mer-i-kah!” exclaims the instructor, referring to world of wonders meaning, who had fallen in love with the colourful birds on a summer visit to her father’s country of India.
In A Book Where The Essays Frequently Span Decades
from the author’s upbringing in the 1980s to the present, Nezhukumatathil’s two children and maternal issues pop in and out of the narrative, becoming increasingly prominent in the second half of the book. They make brief cameos from time to time, such as when she and her husband wait in queue with two small sons to view a flowering corpse flower at the botanic gardens. In others, they are more prominent. “Calendars Poetica” chronicles Nezhukumatathil’s first year as a mother in one brief entry every month, catching spurts of enthusiasm and bleary-eyed weariness, flowering clematis and handwritten letters, poetry readings and garden pests, and her son’s first snow angel and steps.
Nezhukumatathil’s Sense Of Humour Shines Through
“Whale Shark,” as she considers her own mortality while floating in a shark tank: “I could picture it so clearly: my then two-year-old son would never even remember me, would be haunted forever by the loss of his mother, the first known casualty of being accidentally gummed to bits by a gentle whale shark.” She explores the connections of mothers and daughters, grandparents and grandsons, and grandmothers and grandchildren in “world of wonders meaning” through bites of sweet, delicate orange. In “Octopus,” she and her boys visit a Greek beach while hoping to view an octopus up close, an encounter that ends tragically for the octopus.
One Of The Most Affecting Works In The Collection
“Questions while Searching for Birds with my Half-White Sons, Aged Six and Nine, National Audubon Bird Count Day, Oxford, MS.” It’s organised as a sequence of stand-alone questions and remarks, with no dialogue tags or narrative, as the children’s observations regarding the difference in plumage between male and female cardinals lead to a discussion about camouflage, racism, school shootings, extinction, and death: “Will you still be gone when I’m fifty?” Will you be gone when I’m sixty?” her son wonders, since youngsters have a habit of focusing on their parents’ darkest worries. Nezhukumatathil manages to leaven the dialogue significantly as it gets into deeper and darker subject matter by inserting into the list of increasingly difficult concerns one repeating query that all parents can relate to: ‘Is there a toilet nearby?’
“World of wonders meaning, and it takes putting yourself in the right place at the right world of wonders meaning,” Nezhukumatathil says near the end of the collection. To find the world, we must be interested enough to put aside our minor diversions.” She regrets the extinction of both fireflies and the era when children played outside until dark instead of going to screens. She takes on the persona of another of the magnificent creatures she profiles: the southern cassowary, which, in addition to lethal claws, a horny ‘casque’ on top of its head, and a ‘carnival in the jungle’ appearance, has a vocalisation that falls below the range of human hearing but is said to be felt in the bones. Nezhukumatathil envisions sending these “boom” sounds out as a warning and a cease-and-desist order to anyone who would despoil the natural world: world of wonders meaning, and boom! I believe her plea is being heard, based on the overwhelming popularity of this best-selling and award-winning collection of essays.