Margarita Engle's _The Wild Book_

The Plot: The Wild Book (2012) by Margarita Engle is verse novel inspired by the stories and experiences Engle's maternal grandmother told her about her childhood growing up in Cuba in the early 1900s. As she explains in her author's note, the verse novel follows Fefa (Josefa de la Caridad Uria Pena) who lives on a small farm in the countryside during a time of "chaos following Cuba's war for independence from Spain and the subsequent US occupation of the island. It was a time of lawlessness, when bandits terrorized the countryside, kidnapping children unless their families agreed to deliver ransom money" (123). From the first poem in the collection, readers learn that Fefa has "word-blindness" (3)-- "a medical term used in the early twentieth century for what we now call dyslexia" (125). The narrative focuses on Fefa's struggle with dyslexia and learning to read and write through poetic exploration, as well as Fefa's encounter with Fausto, her family's old farm manager, who writes a sloppy "ugly" poem in her honor (42); Fefa is mortified by Fausto's attention.

The Poetry: Like many other of Engle's verse novels, The Wild Book employs free verse, lyricism, and imagery to tell the story of a young girl's experiences. The Wild Book in many ways shows a young girl developing a love for reading poetry and writing in her own wild book, which her mother gives to her upon her diagnosis with word-blindness: "Think of this little book / as a garden, / Mama suggests" (5-6). Her mother advises her to view her writing as a path to maturation and self-acceptance:

Throw wildflower seeds

all over each page, she advises.

Let the words sprout

like seedlings,

then relax and watch

as your wild diary

grows. (6) 

And eventually, a love of language emerges within Fefa. She exclaims later in the collection in a poem entitled "Fly to the Truth of Dreams" that she "love[s] the way poetry / turns ordinary words / into winged things" (68). In addition to the imagery and lyricism Engle relies upon, she also utilizes repetition and the space on the page to emphasize the ways in which Fefa's struggle with dyslexia manifests itself, as well as how she begins to find ways to allow herself to experience more comfort and pleasure in language.

The Page: Engle's verse novel begins with a dedication "for young readers who dread reading and for those who love blank books" which answers one of the chargers that the verse novel form is ideal for reluctant readers. This dedication is followed by a quote in Spanish with a translation from the poet Ruben Dario, who is referred to throughout the narrative as the Fefa's mother's favorite poet. The quote reads: "In the hour of daydreams my eyes watched / the blank page // And there came a parade of dreams and shadows" (from "La Pagina Blanca" or "The Blank Page"). This epigraph complicates Engle's dedication in that it demonstrates the complexity and intertextual, cross-cultural references made throughout the collection. The book ends with an author's note that includes a family photograph of Fefa from 1914 and an acknowledgements section.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Wild Book; I give it four stars and highly recommend it.

Pamela L. Laskin's _Ronit and Jamil_

The Plot: Pamela L. Laskin's Ronit and Jamil (2017) is a contemporary retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in the Middle East. The protagonists, Ronit (an Israeli girl) and Jamil (a Palestinian boy), are teenagers living in the present-day on either side of the barrier fence that divides Israel and Gaza. Ronit and Jamil first meet when they go to work with their fathers. Ronit's father is a pharmacist and Jamil's father is a doctor; the two men know and respect each other. Once Jamil and Ronit fall desperately in love, though, their families do not support them and become hostile toward each other. The verse novel is told primarily from the alternating viewpoints of the titular characters, but also includes the voices of their fathers in act IV. As Laskin notes in her afterword, the voices of the two teenagers sound very similar and that was a conscious decision on her part (180). Although this technique makes it difficult to tell who is who at the beginning of the narrative, it allows the reader to not quite become fully immersed in the story.

The Poetry: Although the majority of the poems in the collection are told in free verse, with a mirrored version of the poem spoken by the opposite character, Laskin also employs a variety of other poetic forms throughout Ronit and Jamil including a series of ghazals (a Middle-Eastern lyric poem with a fixed number of verses and repeated rhyme, typically on the theme of love and often set to music) and a crown of sonnets (a series of multiple 14-line poems, where each new sonnet begins with the last line of the previous sonnet). Laskin utilizes lyricism, rhyme, repetition, and imagery in order to convey the sense of longing shared by Ronit and Jamil. For example in the ghazals that appear together in one spread, "Built of Bones: Jamil's Ghazal" and "Water: Ronit's Ghazal," the speakers of the poems meditate on embodiment and their connection:

There is nothing but the body

built of bones,

when I find myself beside you

I rise like bones;

from the dead and my desire

it grows like bones. (124)

In Ronit's counterpoint, she laments, "my body withers in brutal summer / so what I need is water" and "if your body's mine / I'll need no water" (125). Additionally, multiple poems reference lines from Romeo and Juliet, as well as work by other poet such as Mahmoud Darwish.

The Page: Ronit and Jamil is divided into five acts: "Naming Things," "Complications" (which includes the series of ghazals), "Dreaming an Escape: Overlapping Voices," "A Father's Lament" (which is made up of a crown of sonnets), and "Onward." The verse novel is also bookended by an introduction, reader's note, and epigraph, as well as an afterword and acknowledgement section. I found Ronit and Jamil to be an interesting and lively read. I give it four stars.

Skila Brown's _To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party_

The Plot: Skila Brown's 2016 To Stay Alive: Mary Ann Graves and the Tragic Journey of the Donner Party is a historical verse novel that explores the life and experiences of nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Graves, a real-life settler who traveled with her family, the Donner family, and several other families across the country to reach California in the 1840s. Brown bases her narrative on historical records and research to tell a particularly compelling story of a young woman's survival in a time of hardship, chaos, and ultimately horror. The nearly 300-page verse novel takes place over the course of one year, beginning in the spring of 1846 and ending in the spring of 1847. Mary Ann travels from Lacon, Illinois with her family which includes her mother, father, older married sister, three younger brothers, four younger sisters, and a hired teamster named John. Mary Ann is a quilter and a strong young woman who likes to speak her mind.

The Poetry: Brown's To Stay Alive is primarily comprised of free verse poems that make use of rich imagery, lyricism, and the space on the page, but the verse novel also includes a few concrete poems that take the shape of what they describe or allude to in the poem. For instance, the poem on page 3, "Father" is shaped like a sphere on the page and describes Mary Ann's father as "burning like the sun" and "itching" to leave on their journey. Likewise, the poem "Inside the Wagon" spreads single words across the space of the page drawing attention to the fact that riding inside the wagon is bumpy: "never still never / smooth / always bump shake rattle" (41). While these poems were interesting in terms of form and content, the poem that I found most moving and rhythmic was the final poem in the collection, "A New Quilt." This nine-page poem shows Brown's skill in the long lyric poem, something that I have yet to see many verse novelists for young readers do well. In "A New Quilt" Brown uses anaphora, lyricism, imagery, and a rhythmic line that mimics the work of quilting to tell the last bits of Mary Ann's narrative. The repeated refrains "I'm stitching / a new quilt" at the beginning of stanzas and "I stitch" justified to the right side of the page at the end of many lines become a place of meditation for the reader as she considers the ways that Mary Ann copes with her loss of many of her family members.

The Page: In addition to being divided into five sections that reflect the seasonal changes, Brown's verse novel also contains a variety of paratextual documents to aid the reader in understanding the historical time period and Brown's research process. The front papers include an article from The Lacon Home Journal announcing that a local family is headed to the west, as well as a two-page map spread that provides the path that Mary Ann's family followed. The end papers include an epilogue, an author's note, a photograph of the real Mary Ann Graves, a list of individuals who were part of the Donner party divided into families with their ages and survival status listed, and an acknowledgments section. Her website also includes an educational guide to pair with the verse novel and a variety of blog posts with more details about the Donner party.

I found Brown's To Stay Alive to be a surprisingly engaging narrative. While the subject matter (cannibalism) initially made me wary of the author's ability to tackle such a topic in a new way, Brown was able to skillfully and successfully weave Mary Ann's story together through her use of lyric poetry. To Say Alive was a page-turner. I give it four stars and highly recommend it.

A. L. Sonnichsen's _Red Butterfly_

The Plot: Red Butterfly (2015) by A. L. Sonnichsen is a three part verse novel that tells the story of Kara, a preteen Chinese girl growing up in Tianjin. Kara was abandoned as an infant because of a hand deformity and taken in by an older American woman living in China. As Kara grows up, she comes to understand that her foster mother has been living illegally in China with an expired visa and that she has never officially adopted Kara, so she does not have paperwork to prove her identity. All of these issues come to a head when her mother's 40-year-old daughter Jody comes to visit, collapses, and the police are notified. Kara is sent to an orphanage where she meets and befriends Toby, a physical therapist, who helps care for children with diseases and deformities. Eventually Kara is faced with the difficulty of wanting to be with her foster mother and the possibility of being adopted by a family from Florida. While it seemed like the narrative was dangerously close to relying on the "white savior" trope, Sonnichsen does explain that she takes her own experiences living in China and volunteering at an orphanage as inspiration for the events of her verse novel. Sonnichsen reveals in her author's note that she grew up in Hong Kong, spent eight years as an adult living in Tianjin, China, and eventually adopted her daughter from a Chinese orphanage.

The Poetry: Sonnichsen's nearly 400-page verse novel utilizes lyrical free verse to tell Kara's story. Like some other verse novels for young readers, Sonnichsen project does not adhere to the traditional poetic practice of beginning each new poem on its own page; it appears that she does this to save space, but this practice also forefronts the novelistic aspect of the work. Many of the early poems in the collection employ imagery, sound, and repetition to great effect, but as the collection continues, these poetic techniques are discarded in favor of a focus on plot. The title poem, "Red Butterfly," an early poem in the collection, employs impactful poetic techniques such as imagery, space, and consonance:

I ride with my hair

whipping back,

a long,

flapping

black flag.

..........

The city

is a blur.

No one stares,

..........

when I am alone,

pedaling my ruby-red bicycle.

No one knows I am different,

..........

flitting between them,

       a red butterfly. (7-8)

The Page: Red Butterfly is divided into three sections entitled "Crawl," "Dissolve," and "Fly"-- each section playing on the metaphor for transformation (from a caterpillar to a chrysalis to a butterfly). One of the most interesting elements of the verse novel are the collaged illustrations by Amy June Bates. Every four or five pages includes a small illustration, most of the times in the margins of the poems. These illustrations appear to collage bits and scraps of Chinese newspapers combined with pencil drawings. They are quite lovely.

Overall, I give Red Butterfly three stars. It was a fine verse novel; the narrative was engaging, the illustrations were captivating, and the poetry in the early parts of the collection was well-done.

Sarah Crossan's _One_

The Plot: Sarah Crossan's 2015 verse novel One tells the story of conjoined twins, Grace and Tippi. The girls have been home schooled their whole lives, but at the beginning of the narrative they start their junior year of high school at a private school. Initially worried that they will be mocked and isolated, Grace and Tippi are excited when they meet and befriend Yasmeen and Jon, both of whom are also outsiders (Yasmeen has HIV and Jon has a rough home life). The narrative follows the protagonist, Grace, as she experiences going to school for the first time, having her first crush, feeling less connected to Tippi, and her parents' separation. Both Grace and Tippi see their therapists regularly to process their feelings and support their mental health. In addition to all of these issues, their younger sister Dragon, who is a ballet dancer, is also beginning to show signs of anorexia. Toward the middle of the narrative, it is clear that Tippi and Grace are beginning to experience some health issues that eventually lead their doctors to decide that they need to have separation surgery in order for one or both of them to survive. Grace is having serious heart issues after struggling to get over the flu, causing her to need a heart transplant, which she cannot get while living as a conjoined twin. Eventually the sisters and their family decide that they will go through with the surgery, although it is likely that Grace will not survive.


The Poetry: Like many verse novels for young readers, Crossan's One makes use of free verse throughout the narrative. In addition to the use of the gaps and space created by line breaks, Crossan also makes use of repetition, and when the narrative tension is at its highest point toward the end of the verse novel, Crossan alters the justification of the text of her poems from left to center. Overall, the use of free verse makes sense, but the repetition and justification of text seem a bit gimmicky and don't serve the narrative much. For example, page 366 features a poem titled "Tippi" that is made up of the word "Tippi" repeated 97 times: 12 lines each feature 8 repetitions of the word followed by question marks, while a final line features a single repetition of "Tippi" with a period. There doesn't seem to be much point to including a poem like this as it doesn't play with form in any significant way and the repetition doesn't serve to move the narrative forward or reveal anything about the character.

The Page: One is divided into sections based upon the months from August to February. Each new section is marked by an illustrated page that features the silhouette of what appear to be a portion of a chain of paper dolls. The dolls are meant to represent the connections that Grace and Tippi share, not just the physical, embodied experience of being conjoined, but also their bonds as sisters, twins, and partners in life.

Crossan's One was a quick read, and the narrative certainly draws on the tradition of the problem novel in YA literature, but there were a few issues. The topical focus on conjoined twins was discussed briefly in an author's note at the end of the text, but there could have been more focus on engaging with disability or difference from a medical and social standpoint. Additionally, the author's use of poetic techniques seemed strained at times and could have been more purposeful. I give Crossan's verse novel two stars.

Linda Oatman High's _A Heart Like Ringo Starr_

The Plot: Linda Oatman High's 2015 A Heart Like Ringo Starr tells the story of 17-year-old Faith Hope Stevens who is awaiting a heart transplant. Faith, who has been sick since she was born, is home-schooled, and her family runs a funeral home, so death seems to always be a part of her life. The narrative follows Faith through her experience of being on the transplant list, to discovering that she will receive a heart transplant, to her life with a new heart and the uncertainties and surprises that arise from this transition in her life. Before her transplant, Faith is depicted as cynical, and she expects that it is not just a matter of if she will die but when. After she receives a new heart, she feels unsure of who she is and longs to have her old, defective heart back. Faith starts her senior year at high school (it is not as exciting as she thought it would be and she feels on-display and invisible at the same time), and she meets a young man while at the beach with her great aunt. The narrative moves surprisingly quickly through each of these events and has a closed, happily-ever-after ending.

The Poetry: Throughout the verse novel, Oatman High utilizes a significant amount of end and internal rhyme, as well as a considerable amount of white space. These two poetic techniques seem at odds with each other throughout the collection. The use of rhyme speeds the narrative up, which seems to contradict the serious subject matter. The white space created by the use of short lines, half-blank page, and alternatively left and right justified text might usually act as a method to slow the reader's pace in verse novels, while in A Heart Like Ringo Starr these techniques juxtaposed with the extensive use of rhyme and the sporadic changes in typography do not seem as purposeful. For example, in the poem "Wintertime," three four to five line stanzas include only one to five words and the facing page leave the top half of the page blank and includes two similarly short stanzas that end the poem:

Bummer.

I so

want summer.

Popsicles.

Not icicles.

This pedicure tickles

                                 my

                                         toes (9).

This use of rhyme and space on the page does little in terms of narrative work or linguistic play, and ultimately the poem falls flat. Other poems such as the title poem, "A Heart Like Ringo Starr" (91), are on the verge of successfully exploring a character's thoughts and feelings with rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism, but in the end the poem is less impactful because of the author's choice of line length and use of white space.

The Page: A Heart Like Ringo Starr is divided into two parts that follow Faith before and after her transplant. As previously noted, the poems make use of white space and typography play. It seems that the author made some of her choices because she sees her work appealing to "reluctant readers." This argument for the use of white space and short lines as inviting to readers because less appears on the page seems to be a mistake and a view that doesn't take young readers seriously as an audience. Ultimately, white space and poetic language within a verse novel are most successful when they encourage a reader to slow down and meditate upon the narrative, emotion, and meaning.

I give Oatman High's verse novel two stars.

K. A. Holt's _Rhyme Schemer_

The Plot: Rhyme Schemer (2014) is K. A. Holt's second verse novel for young readers (following her 2010 Brains for Lunch: A Zombie Novel in Haiku). Holt's Rhyme Schemer follows Kevin Jamison, a seventh grader who is struggling with his home life and his school life. Both of his parents are doctors who are never around, all four of his older brothers ignore him, and he and another student Robin are constantly taking turns tormenting each other. Kevin's one solace is creating poetry through erasure (by defacing classic books for young readers, which most all of his teachers and his principal frown upon). As punishment for his bullying he is forced to work shelving books in the library where he meets Mrs. Little, who encourages him in his poetry. When Robin finds Kevin's poetry notebook and begins posting his work around school, he realizes how much his poetry means to him.

The Poetry: Holt's verse novel follows Sharon Creech's Love That Dog in that it essentially functions as a young poet's writing notebook. Like Creech's verse novel for younger readers, Rhyme Schemer emphasizes the reluctant poet character, his connection to a trusted teacher/librarian, and the young poet's hidden emotional pain. For example in the poem "Friday Rescue" Mrs. Little finds Kevin outside a restaurant alone and crying after his parents send him out for making a scene at dinner. Kevin is astonished when his teacher begins to praise him in front of his parents:

She called me

A schemer, no doubt.

But also?

Smart.

Funny.

Fragile (134). 

Mrs. Little then asks to borrow Kevin and take him to a poetry open mic night at a local coffee house. One of the most interesting and innovative elements of Holt's verse novel is her use of erasure poetry; there are 10 erasure poems dispersed throughout the novel pulled from The Wind and the Willows, Peter Pan, and Hansel and Gretel, among others. There are also a series of quatrains with regular rhyme schemes that Kevin calls "Necktie Poems" (written about his principal).

The Page: Through its writing journal structure, Rhyme Schemer provides yet another unique approach to the verse novel form. Poems are titled as either days of the school year or are pasted in pages of other book pages that Kevin uses to create erasure poems. Verse novels like Holt's and Creech's certainly serve a pedagogical function in that they provide an outline for how developing writers might approach poetry. In this way, the writing journal structure in the verse novel is distinct in its approach and call to young readers who want to be writers in that the form and structure imply a participatory reader experience. The structure serves as a model, one that is referred to by other verse novelists such as Kwame Alexander, whose protagonist reads and refers to Holt's Rhyme Schemer and then creates his own erasure poems after this model.

I found K. A. Holt's Rhyme Schemer to be another fascinating exercise in form and poetic experimentation. I give it four stars.

Meg Wiviott's _Paper Hearts_

The Plot: Paper Hearts, Meg Wiviott's 2015 historical verse novel, is based upon the true story of the group of young women who survived the Holocaust, experienced the horrors of Auschwitz, and endured the death marches at the end of the war. Wiviott's narrative focuses specifically on two young women, Fania and Zlatka, who became friends and worked together as part of the Union Kommando (work squad) for the Weichsel Union Metallwerke (private factory in Auschwitz that made munitions for the Third Reich). The narrative of Paper Hearts focuses not only on the historical events, but also on the friendship and experiences of Fania and Zlatka and one specific act of defiance and love-- Zlatka's creation of a birthday card for Fania's 20th birthday. Wiviott was inspired to tell this story after seeing "Fania's Heart" on display at the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. The author notes in her "What Is True?" section at the end of the verse novel that she relied upon "the USC Shoah Foundation's audiovisual testimonies of Fania Fainer (Fania Landau) and Zulema Pitluk (Zlatka Sznaiderhauz), the film documentary The Heart of Auschwitz (Ad Hoc Films), the testimony given by Zlatka on the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre website, and several e-mail and telephone conversations with Fania's daughter" (329). The narrative consists of fourteen chapters which alternate the first person perspectives of Fania and Zlatka. Both girls' narrative begins with their experiences living in different ghettos; Zlatka lives in Pruzany ghetto with her parents and three siblings, and Fania lives in Bialystok with her parents and two siblings. Zlatka observes Fania upon their arrival in Auschwitz; Zlatka is alone, having been separated from her family, and Fania is with only her younger sister Necha. Necha eventually becomes ill and is taken to Block 25, where prisoners were housed before they were sent to the gas chambers. Sick with despair, Fania begins to lose hope, and it is only her friendship with Zlatka that brings her back from the brink.

The Poetry: Wiviott, like several other verse novelists reviewed on this blog, is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts's MFA program in writing for children and young adults. Her verse novel is full of lyricism, imagery, and music that makes her exploration of this historical moment fresh. For example, in the poem "74207," Fania meditates upon the landscape of Auschwitz Birkenau and her body:

Just outside the barbed-wire fence,

A stand of birches.

I'd never seen trees the color of ghosts.

Bark streaked with black,

Lashes on the skin.

Blending with the

Winter sky

....

My forearm,

    Thin as paper,

    Losing luster,

    Scarred with black. (117)

In this poem, the haunting image of ghost trees and the dull landscape is richly mirrored in Fania's body. Other poems, like "Coping," provide similarly grim representations of life during the Holocaust. In this poem, Zlatka watches a horrible scene unfold on a spring day: "Upwind from the chimneys / blue sky hung like a promise / in the air." Zlatka describes watching three girls holding hands who "walked past us / toward the / shadow of the chimneys" and the electrified fence: "one girl lifted her hand to the fence... / Death rippled / through her fingers / radiated to the others" (212).

The Page: One unique thing about Paper Hearts is its inclusion of the image of Fania's paper heart and its incorporation of translations of the inscriptions inside the heart card throughout the last half of the narrative. Each of these translation pages is a darker gray color and includes an image of stitching at the edge of the page. One of the final pages of the narrative also includes a reproduced image of the actual heart on display at the Holocaust Memorial Centre. These elements, along with the glossary, bibliography, and author's "What Is True?" sections contribute to the construction of the verse novel as a whole and link the narrative to the actual historical events it portrays.

Meg Wiviott's Paper Hearts was a beautiful and fresh historical verse narrative. I give it four stars and highly recommend it.

Skila Brown's _Caminar_

The Plot: Skila Brown's 2014 verse novel Caminar tells the story of Carlos, a young boy growing up in Guatemala in 1981. According to the prefatory note to the reader, Brown's narrative is inspired by the real events and experiences of individuals living in Guatemala during the period after 1954 when the "democratically elected government of Guatemala was overthrown by a group of military men who were unhappy with the way the government had been passing laws to help poor farmers in rural communities. Forty horrible years followed, in which the people of Guatemala tried to resist, organize, and bring about change." Carlos lives in a small farming village with his mother in the mountains and is at the point where he is still treated like a child but wants to be grown up. When a group of soldiers come through their village asking for names of Communists and promising money for individuals who provide names, Carlos's mother and community begin to worry. The villagers decide that if the soldiers or the rebels fighting against them return to their village again, they will run and hide in the trees. While some of Carlos's friends wish to stay and defend the village, Carlos's mother is adamant that he run if anything happens. A few days later, when Carlos walks to the edge of the village and into the jungle to gather mushrooms for his mother to make soup, the soldiers return and massacre his village. He escapes into the jungle and hides in a tree; unsure about whether or not to return or to flee, he decides to make his way to the village where his grandmother lives. Along the way, he encounters a group of rebels and, after some trepidation, he begins to walk with them. Carlos teaches them what he knows about the jungle, plants, animals, hunting, and hiding. Once he reaches his grandmother's village, he must decide whether to carry on with the rebels or stay and defend the village.

The Poetry: Some of the most interesting features of Brown's verse novel are her use of space, repetition, shape, and language. Throughout Caminar, which is the Spanish word for "walk," Brown relies heavily upon the use of repetition and the blending of English, Spanish, and other indigenous languages to emphasize the significance of voice, cultural experience, and character subjectivity in the narrative. For example, in the poem "Nahuales," an elder named Santiago explains the process of coming of age for young men when he was growing up in which each young man enters the jungle to meet his animal spirit protectors:

I looked up to the trees,

away from his eyes. I did not want to tell him

no one believes anymore

in nahuales,

spirit animals who guides us in life, keep us

safe.        I walked away.

                           But I wondered

                                   which animal

                                           he saw. (22)

This poem foregrounds the tensions between Carlos's connections with his cultural history and the circumstances of his experience of war. These tensions are also connected to Carlos's desire to grow up, to go to work instead of school, and his mother's insistence that he is too young to think about participating in work and war.

The Page: Brown makes use of the space on the page and shape in her poems. Many of her poems employ right and left justification, dual columns on either side of the page, and are shaped to evoke the imagery her narrative conveys. For example, the poems "Ah Xochil" (4) and "Eye to Eye" (90) utilize right and left justified columns that encourage readers to read and reread poems in a variety of ways to glean different meanings from the poem. Concrete poems such as "After They Left" (35) and "I Climbed a Tree" utilize the space on the page and shape. "After They Left" depicts a series of voices from the village giving their opinion about what to do if any soldiers return; this poem depicts the lines of dialogue spread across the page as if the voices are coming from many different people and co-mingling together. "I Climbed a Tree" is shaped simply as a tree, utilizes repetition to depict climbing, and describes Carlos's experience of terror as he waits in the tree while soldiers with machetes and rifles pass through after destroying his village.

Brown's Caminar was a fascinating read. I give it four stars.

Nikki Grimes's _Words with Wings_

The Plot: Nikki Grimes's Words with Wings (2013) was named a Coretta Scott King honor book in 2014 and tells the story of daydreamer Gabriella. Gabby's story begins with a poem entitled "Prologue" which explains how her parents decided on her name. Most of the poems focus on the primary narrative: Gabby's parents have just divorced and she and her mother have moved to a new town where she starts a new school. In addition to the focus on Gabby's changing home life, these poems also track her struggle in school and at home with being labeled a daydreamer. At school, most of her teachers remark that "her mind tends to wander," while at home her mother is constantly frustrated that she can't stay on task with her chores or doesn't seem to be listening. Gabby thinks this tension with her mother might have something to do with the fact that her daydreaming is something she gets from her father. The one teacher who seems to support her daydreaming is her English teacher, Mr. Spicer. When Gabby suddenly stops daydreaming, she becomes even more withdrawn and sad; it is her English teacher who encourages her by suggesting that her entire class spend some time every day writing down their daydreams. It seems that this helps her pay attention in class, and her mother begins to praise her for being such a great writer.

The Poetry: This short 83 page verse novel is comprised of mostly short free verse poems, with a few haiku and concrete poems. Eighteen of the poems are Gabby's "daydreams," and these poems are set off in a different sans-serif font and a slightly larger font size. Each of the daydream poems begins with the same refrain that focuses on the poem's title image. For example, the poem "Waterfall" begins:

Say "waterfall,"

and the dreary winter rain

outside my classroom window

turns to liquid thunder,

pounding into a clear pool

miles below,

and I can't wait

to dive in (30).

Most of the poems in Words with Wings fall into a similar pattern of using a key word to evoke an image. Mostly these poems are not extremely compelling, but they do work similar to that of Sharon Creech's Love That Dog in that they show a young person learning the intricacies of language and practicing at being a writer of poetry. A few poems in this collection incorporate interesting rhyme and imagery, but even these ultimately have endings that feel overly didactic or have a strange exclamatory clause at the end. For example, the title poem "Words with Wings" begins with interesting sound and imagery: "Some words / sit still on the page / holding a story steady" and "But other words have wings / that wake my daydreams," but ends with the phrase, "I can't help / but buckle up / for the ride!" (11).

The Page: The organization of Grimes's verse novel seemed a bit strange. At first it seemed that the daydream poems might have been flashbacks, but towards the end of the narrative it became clear that they were parts of her daydream journal. I am not sure that this was an effective organizational strategy.

Overall, Words with Wings is a fine verse novel. I give it three stars.

Andrea Davis Pinkney's _The Red Pencil_

The Plot: The Red Pencil (2014), written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Shane W. Evans, takes place in Sudan in 2004 and tells the story of Amira. The narrative opens on the day of Amira's twelfth birthday, the day she can exchange her tarha for a toob (a child's headscarf for a woman's sari-like garment). Part one of the verse novel meditates upon Amira's family and cultural traditions; her mother and father tell her birth story (26-31) and her little sister Leila's birth story (38-43), she practices calling the Sayidda Moon (glowing lady) with her family (36), and Amira meditates upon the goz (sandy soil of Darfur) "sprinkled by Allah" and its connection to her family's farm (52). The reader also learns that Amira loves to draw in the sand and desires, more than anything, to one day attend school, which goes against her mother's wishes that she follow tradition and marry. Toward the end of part one, her parents begin to worry about the Janjaweed militia attacks and war. After the Janjaweed attacks her village, she journeys with whats left of her family and neighbors to a refugee center called Kalma Camp. While the camp is safer, Amira and her family are forced to live with thousands of others in poor conditions. For a while, the grief Amira experiences causes her to lose her voice, and it isn't until an aid worker named Miss Sabine offers her a red pencil and tablet for drawing and writing that she begins to regain her voice and desire to learn. Her old neighbor eventually begins to teach her to read and write in secret, and the narrative ends hopefully as the possibility for education and healing are within Amira's grasp.

The Poetry: Pinkney uses lyrical free verse throughout her verse novel; some of the most prevalent poetic techniques in her work include anaphora, imagery, and internal rhyme. Language play and rich imagery abound in the poems that describe Amria's family's journey to the Kalma Camp. For example, in the poem "Soles" Amira wishes she could be closer to her mother as they traveled: "I could press my chest right to her. / I could send my hearth's drumming to Muma's heart, / sliced with sorrow" (125), and in the poem "Hungry," Pinkney uses internal rhyme for effect: "A clump of corn, / swallowed down with the little bit of wet / I can summon from my tongue" (129). The pain of Amira's loss after the Janjaweed attack is exemplified through Pinkney's use of imagery in the poem "Locked":

I know the names,

but can't say them.

I shake my head.

Pain-clouds rise in Muma's eyes.

She takes both my hands in hers.

Holds them.

Kneads them,

as if she's shaping dough.

"Amira, sorrow's fence

has locked you in," she says (158-59).

Once again this poem uses internal rhyme, lyricism, metaphor, and imagery in order to illustrate the experience of grief and the connection between Amira and her mother.

The Page: The Red Pencil, like many other verse novels, includes several paratextual elements that add to the reader's experience including: a map, a glossary/pronunciation guide, an author's note that includes historical information, and definitions of important terms. One of the most striking things about The Red Pencil are Evans's pencil sketches that illustrate the verse novel. These sketches fill the blank spaces left by the poems and add much to the collaged aspects of the narrative. As Pinkney clarifies in her Author's Note, "The Red Pencil's illustrated poems follow one child's journey through grief and possiblity. Part novel, part sketchbook, this story celebrates the power of creativity, and the way that art can help us heal (312).

I give The Red Pencil four stars and highly recommend it.

Mariko Nagai's _Dust of Eden_

The Plot: Markio Nagai's verse novel Dust of Eden (2014) takes place between 1941 to 1945 and focuses on the experiences of thirteen-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa and her Japanese American family as they are forced from their home in Seattle and relocated to an internment camp in Idaho after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Amidst increasing discrimination in their town, Mina's father is imprisoned, and her family is then placed on a bus with only two pieces of luggage each to Camp Harmony in Puyallup, Washington. After four months, her family must travel again by train to Minidoka Relocation Center in Hunt, Idaho where they live for three years. Throughout the narrative, Mina struggles with her identity and experience of living as a Japanese American during a tumultuous time in US history. Her grandfather and father practice "the stoic Japanese principle known as gaman, which means to bear hardship silently" (122), while her eighteen-year-old brother Nick expresses his anger and frustration at the unfair treatment of Japanese Americans by the US government and eventually volunteers to join the Japanese American regiment in the US military to prove his loyalty to his country. Throughout the narrative, Mina expresses sadness and longing for the way her life used to be; she misses her home, her cat Basho, her best friend Jamie, and her family being together and happy.

The Poetry: The free verse poems in Dust of Eden utilize a variety of poetic techniques and formal approaches to express Mina's story. Some of the most prevalent features of Nagai's collection are the use of imagery, anaphora, lyricism, and metaphor. Each of these features in the poem "October 1942":

Dust enters

during the night like a thief,

leaving mounds 

of sand in all corners

of the room where the wind left it,

leaving mounds like graves,

even on top of us, burying us

while we were asleep.

Dust enters through our noses

and mouths while we are asleep (53).

In this poem and many others in the collection, Nagai uses space and symbol to illustrate the hopelessness and grief experienced by those interned in the camps during World War II. Poems like "September 1942" utilize space and movement on the page to depict mundane every-day experiences of internment such as the way in which internees were forced to stand in "line after line" while imprisoned (51), while other spare poems like "July 1945" disclose the horrors of internment: "A woman killed her baby / today because she was / afraid of leaving the camp" (114).

The Page: Nagai's verse novel is divided into five sections each focused on place; each poem is titled with the month and the year to give the collection a diary or journal-like quality. In addition to free verse poems, Dust of Eden also presents Mina's experiences through letters to and from Mina and essays written by Mina for school. This approach contributes to the layered and assembled nature of the verse novel as a work that contains not just lyric poetry but also documents and correspondences.

I found the narrative of Nagai's Dust of Eden fascinating and affecting, and the poetry beautifully and uniquely crafted. I give Dust of Eden four stars and highly recommend it.

Jacqueline Woodson's _Brown Girl Dreaming_

Published in 2014, Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming has been awarded the 2014 National Book Award for Young People, the 2015 Coretta Scott King Award, and was named a 2015 Newbery Honor Book. In the summer of 2015, Woodson was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. On the Poetry Foundation's website, they note that this "title is given to a living writer in recognition of a career devoted to writing exceptional poetry for young readers. The laureate advises the Poetry Foundation on matters relating to young people’s literature and may engage in a variety of projects to help instill a lifelong love of poetry among the nation’s developing readers. This laureateship aims to promote poetry to children and their families, teachers, and librarians over the course of its two-year tenure." This week, I read Brown Girl Dreaming for the fifth time and taught it for the third semester in my Literature for the Intermediate Reader class at Western Michigan University. If you are interested in teaching Woodson's work, HERE is an activity that I use to open up my students' discussion of Brown Girl Dreaming. Each time I come to Woodson's work, I find something new, and it becomes a richer text for me.

The Plot: In Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson traces the experiences of her first person speaker Jackie (who is the representation of Woodson's childhood self). The narrative begins at her birth and describes what life was like growing up during the civil rights era in both the North and the South. Jackie's parents separate when she is an infant, and she travels from Ohio with her mother and siblings to live with her maternal grandparents in South Carolina. Eventually, her mother moves the family to Brooklyn, New York. In addition to the examination of racism through the eyes of a young person, Woodson also tackles issues of the broken family, religion, death and illness, imprisonment, and her experience with a learning disability. Brown Girl Dreaming is divided into five sections: "i am born," "the stories of south carolina run like rivers," "followed the sky's mirrored constellation to freedom," "deep i my hear, i do believe," and "ready to change the world." The poetry within these sections is further framed by a rich paratext; Woodson includes a family tree, an epigraph from Langston Hughes's poem "Dreams," a scrapbook collection of family photos, and an author's note.

The Poetry: Brown Girl Dreaming is told primarily in lyrical free verse but is interspersed with a series of eleven haiku. No matter what form she employs, Woodson's poetry reflects a deep meditation upon the historical and personal roots that helped shape her speaker as a writer. For example, the second poem in the collection, "second daughter's second day on earth," begins with the language of Jackie's birth certificate. The first three lines of the poem read: “My birth certificate says: Female Negro / Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro / Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro” (3). The repetition of the final word in each line, “Negro,” emphasizes its significance as a marker, and these first three lines take on the feel of a collaged legal document within the poem. The poem mixes the left justified historical and documentary style narrative with stanzas rich in voice and lyric that are centered and italicized: "I am born brown-skinned, black-haired and wide-eyed / I am born Negro here and Colored there" (3). This poem goes on to reference Dr. King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, and Rosa Parks as important figures who Jackie might model herself after as she grows up. This blending of personal and national history in the poem suggests Woodson’s desire to locate her story within and next to the stories of those individuals who profoundly transformed the world for brown children forever through their roles and their activism in the civil rights movement.

The Page: One theme that Woodson investigates in her memoir in verse is that of silence and blank space. Woodson has noted, “Memories don’t come back as straight narrative. They come in little bursts with white space all around them. It felt more realistic to write mine as poems.” The haiku series within Brown Girl Dreaming speaks volumes in its use of negative space. For example, the first haiku in the series, “how to listen #1” appears in part one of the verse novel entitled “i am born.” In the poem, memory, body, and emotion intertwine as a reflection of the early life of Jackie and her life in Columbus, Ohio with her mother, father, and siblings: “Somewhere in my brain / each laugh, tear and lullaby / becomes memory” (20). This poem encapsulates the drive of the entire collection—the focus of the narrative is remembering a history in order to gain insight into the self and understand the how personal and cultural history shapes an individual.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a gorgeous exploration of personal and national history. Woodson's use of lyricism, imagery, free verse, and haiku are distinct and moving. I give Brown Girl Dreaming five stars and highly recommend it.

Marilyn Nelson's _How I Discovered Poetry_

Recently, The Lion and the Unicorn published its annual essay in which their panel of rotating judges awarded the 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry (see the Critical Perspectives tab for citation). This year's judges, Lissa Paul, Kate Pendlebury, and Craig Svonkin, honored two books published in 2014, one of which was Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry. This year marks the tenth year of the award's existence, and while I am thrilled that this award exists and that poetry for young readers is consistently acknowledged, I very often disagree with the award panels' views on the verse novel for young readers. Since the award's inception in 2005, although the judges rotate every year, it is always clear that the judges find very little merit in the verse novel as a form. They often dismiss and denigrate works as not being "good" poetry. While I agreed with their selection of Nelson's work as an honor book (they actually never refer to How I Discovered Poetry as a verse novel, so it's my understanding that they don't consider it one), I found their discussion of Kwame Alexander's The Crossover and Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming unsettling and frustrating. The judges note that "comically inauthentic is the strongest stuff Alexander has, as most of the book relies upon anemic free verse" (339) and that "Woodson too often destroys the strength of her verse with maladroit line breaks and missed opportunities for structural or linguistic repetition... Woodson's ear, sadly, is fallible" (340). It is always clear that the judges of The Lion and the Unicorn Award have a very particular kind of poetry in mind, and it is usually not a poetry that is representative of the current trends in contemporary American poetry. This week, I take a closer look at Nelson's work and will follow up next week with a look at Woodson's verse novel; both works are unique in their exploration of autobiography and the personal, race, childhood, and American history. Marilyn Nelson is the author of poetry for adults and young readers; her poetry has received numerous awards and honors including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Honor, National Book Award Finalist, and Printz Honor.

The Plot: Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) includes an author's note at the back (which has become a standard for verse novels that explore the author's past personal history) that explains: "This book is a late-career retrospective, a personal memoir, a 'portrait of the artist as a young American Negro Girl.' The poems cover the decade of the fifties, from 1950, when I was four years old, to 1960, when I was fourteen" (101). The poems in her collection touch on many historical issues and events from the Civil Rights Movement to the Red Scare. Throughout the work, it is clear that place and geography are significant, as each poem is labeled with a location and date. Beginning in Ohio and moving through Texas, Kansas, California, New Hampshire, Maine, and Oklahoma, the narrative follows the speaker's family as they travel across the US. The speaker's father is an officer in the Air Force and her mother is a teacher. The narrative focuses on the young speaker as she discovers her love of books and poetry and as she tries to make friends and understand the changing world around her as her family moves around the country. 

The Poetry: How I Discovered Poetry is a sequence of 50 unrhymed sonnets in iambic pentameter. The poems mostly follow the inner musings of her speaker and play with language and repetition. For example, the first poem in the collection "Blue Footsies" beings by meditating on the word "time": "Once upon a time. Upon a time? / Something got on a time? What is a time? / When it got on a time, could it get off?" (1). This rhythmic questioning continues throughout the poem, and other poems in the collection also emphasize language play. One of the most striking poems in the collection is the title poem, "How I Discovered Poetry," which discloses the speaker's degrading experience at nine years old of having her teacher choose a poem for her to read aloud to her all-white class:

She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,

said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder

until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo-playing

darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats... (97). 

The image created in this poem and the title are striking. I was only disappointed that this was the penultimate poem in the collection; I'd wished this moment would have come sooner in the collection, as it would have given more weight to the events described after, specifically of the speaker's emergence as a young artist.


The Page: Another unique aspect of Nelson's verse narrative is the fact that the pages are illustrated and that there are family photos dispersed throughout the collection. One of the most compelling combinations of word and image comes halfway through the collection on pages 46 and 47. This spread includes the poem "Darkroom" and incorporates an illustration of a string with clothespins holding up three black and white family photos. These same images reappear on the cover. Moments like these draw attention to the book as an artifact and its createdness as a collection of fragments of the author's personal history.


I enjoyed Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry. I highly recommend this collection to anyone interested in autobiography and the verse novel, and I give it four stars.