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181Brian Turner & Ilya Kaminsky QUESTIONS Exploring the Text 1. How would you characterize the speaker of the poem? Cite details from the text to support your response. 2. The speaker repeats the phrase %u201cof money%u201d multiple times in lines 9%u201311. What does this repetition emphasize, and how does it contribute to the speaker%u2019s tone? 3. How does placing %u201cforgive us%u201d (l. 11) in parentheses affect the speaker%u2019s message? Contrast the mood the parentheses create with the experience of the phrase without the punctuation and the experience of the poem%u2019s final lines without the phrase entirely. 4. Kaminsky%u2019s speaker uses first-person plural pronouns such as %u201cwe%u201d and %u201cus.%u201d What effects does this choice create? QUESTIONS Making Connections 5. Both poems share what happens beyond events in a war zone. How do these varying perspectives shape your understanding of war in new ways? 6. Imagine that Turner, the named speaker in %u201cAt Lowe%u2019s Home Improvement Center,%u201d could reply to Kaminsky%u2019s speaker. Would he respond with anger, understanding, resentment, or another emotion? Explain. 7. The speaker in %u201cAt Lowe%u2019s Home Improvement Center%u201d understands the lack of awareness experienced by those not directly affected by a war. What evidence does Turner incorporate into his poem to demonstrate how people %u201clive happily during the war%u201d? QUESTIONS QUESTIONS TalkBack Claire Delfino/Paris Match/Contour/Getty ImagesFatherland Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen (b. 1971) was born in Vietnam and his family immigrated to the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. After three years in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, his family settled in San Jose, California. After high school, Nguyen received a BA in English and Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and stayed there for a PhD in English. He is a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and is the author of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016), the novels The Sympathizer (2015), which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Committed (2021), as well as the short story collection The Refugees (2017) and the memoir A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial (2023). In 2017, he was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship %u201cGenius%u201d Grant. Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.