A Study Guide for Gabriela Mistral's "Fear," 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.

Can it be there was only one summer that I was ten? First published in 1956, May Swenson’s "The Centaur" remains one of her most popular and most anthologized poems. This is its first appearance as a picture book for children. In images bright and brisk and tangible, the poet re-creates the joy of riding a stick horse through a small-town summer. We find ourselves, with her, straddling “a long limber horse with . . . a few leaves for a tail,” and pounding through the lovely dust along the path by the old canal. As her shape shifts from child to horse and back, we know exactly what she feels. Sherry Meidell’s water-color illustrations perfectly convey the wit and beauty of May Swenson’s poem. These are playful, satisfying images full of vitality and imagination. Meidell handles the joy of poem’s fantasy and the joy of its occasional naughtiness with equal success.

A young woman journeys deep into the untamed jungle, wrestling with love and loss, trauma and healing, faith and redemption, in this sweeping debut from "the gutsiest woman adventurer of our day" (Book Magazine) Marika Vecera, an accomplished war reporter, has dedicated her life to helping the world's oppressed and forgotten. When not on one of her dangerous assignments, she lives in Boston, exploring a new relationship with Seb, a psychologist who offers her glimpses of a better world. Returning from a harrowing assignment in the Congo where she was kidnapped by rebel soldiers, Marika learns that a man she has always admired from afar, Pulitzer-winning war correspondent Robert Lewis, has committed suicide. Stunned, she abandons her magazine work to write Lewis's biography, settling down with Seb as their intimacy grows. But when Marika finds a curious letter from a missionary claiming to have seen Lewis in the remote jungle of Papua New Guinea, she has to wonder, What if Lewis isn't dead? Marika soon leaves Seb to embark on her ultimate journey in one of the world's most exotic and unknown lands. Through her eyes we experience the harsh realities of jungle travel, embrace the mythology of native tribes, and receive the special wisdom of Tobo, a witch doctor and sage, as we follow her extraordinary quest to learn the truth about Lewis—and about herself, along the way.

Gabriela Mistral, a teacher, poet, and the first Latina woman to win the Nobel Prize.