ncte poetry notables part 3

Welcome to my next round of mini-reviews of books selected by the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry Committee.  Our brief is to select outstanding collections, anthologies, picture books and verse novels for children aged 3 to 13.  Many of our most interesting discussions were about the verse novels, especially in light of the age range.  Our criteria document says that an outstanding verse novel

~ Is a narrative told in poetic form
~ Demonstrates excellence in writing and emotional impact: does the poetry "create images, express 
   feelings, and stir emotions"?  (Cullinan and Galda) 
~ Uses its format to enrich the story in some way 

                               Galda, L., Cullinan, B.E., & Sipe, L.R. (2010). Literature and the Child. Seventh Edition. 
                               Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning

Each of the books we selected met all these criteria to a certain degree, and I found that I have pretty high standards for the 2nd and 3rd items on that list. To me a successful verse novel should SOUND like poetry when you read it aloud, even if, of all the poetry forms, it is least likely to be read aloud; and the poetry on the page should look and work in a more crafted way than prose just broken into shorter line lengths.  Let's see how two of my favorites accomplish this.

THE MOON WITHIN

by Aida Salazar
illustrated by Joe Cepeda
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2019

Celi is an 11-year-old girl with “a Mexican side and a Caribbean side,” confronting head-on from page 1 the universal experience of a girl's changing body.  In four sections titled as phases of the moon, Celi struggles and stretches to navigate the tensions between body privacy and body positivity, between old cultural ways and current cultural norms, between her love for the people she's always known and her expanding social circles.

This book covers ALL the bases and somehow does it gracefully:  not only does Celi come to accept the first-blood Moon Ceremony that her Mima has planned for her; she finds it in herself to support and defend her best friend Magda as Magda discovers that he is really Marco.  Celi defends Marco when the boy she's crushing on over social media makes fun of him. Throughout, the sound of Afro-Latino music, drumming and dance are foremost: Celi's Papi and Marco are both drummers, and Celi is a dancer in her community bomba performance group.

Papi welcomes me with a nod
turns up his playing
makes brighter sounds
round sounds
colored sounds
a timeless talking unlike
Mima's or Juju's.

I just dance.

Suddenly he switches rhythms
to a samba
and I fall deep in feet movement
a conga
and I climb spirit high from side to side
a bomba
and I twirl and mark my
beat with my arms
that Papi catches
effortlessly, in sync.

I don't see that
Mima and Juju
are both standing
at the door witnessing
with Papi
the closest I have ever
come to clarity
lighter and
as unstuck
as I could ever be.

This book is a direct successor to Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret, giving voice to any girl's uncertainties of identity, but Aida Salazar brings layers and inflections that break that old conversation wide open for 21st century young people.  Some on our committee were a little rocked by the frankness of the language and themes for 11-year-olds (me too!), but as I pointed out, this is the book the 5th graders at my school need, will be passing around the class.  It is frankly, beautifully uncomfortable, creating lasting images through varied languages, rhythms and emotions, and resolves with satisfying clarity.

ALL OF ME
by Chris Baron
Feiwel and Friends, 2019

If Celi's problem is that her Mima sees her all too clearly, Ari Rosensweig's problem is the opposite. 

The life in my head seems
so different from the life outside,
where I am so big
that everyone stares,
but no one sees the real me.

At first glance ALL OF ME seems like a single-issue story, and an important "own voices" one. Questions about body size and body image are for boys too, and this novel is unflinching in expressing the anguish of being a fat kid, a fat BOY.  But through straightforward storytelling, filled with raw emotion, Ari finds that he is far more complex than he himself realized.

In this several books play a big role. Mysterious World by Arthur C. Clark, a catalog of strange and apocryphal creatures are a touchstone for Ari, and their influences are seen in the population of little clay trolls he and his stalwart friend Pick make at his sculptor mother's beachside studio, where Ari leaves behind his old life for the summer, tackles a new way to eat, and finds another way to be.  He carries this with him to New York for a visit with his father.

I stretch out on my bed,
my body a little tighter now,
skin against my muscles,
stomach flatter,
slow breathing.
No voices,
no fire to burn
or hands to dream
            of holding.
No trolls to carve
or stories to write
or gates to lock,
or trash to take out.

No giant terra-cotta
demon spirits, Melinda,
or angels or alien talismans,
no people up and down the streets,
or beach sirens
or pounding waves.
No sleeping on a camping mat
beneath freshly painted murals.
Just moments
          with no eyes on me.

What a relief, to have no eyes but your own on you.  Ari's journey is packed with characters, details, and events that never overwhelm his painstaking, personal progress towards putting his pieces together.  Adult support for Ari comes in the form of doctors and a rabbi who help him separate from the hardest parts of his tangled family life, and the narrative comes across as deeply honest, complicated and true.  I'm always up for more fireworks in terms of format, but Chris Baron's simpler structures carry the complex interlocking motifs well, and the book is successful in every way.

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Join Jone Rush MacCulloch at her blog for the roundup this week, and happy reading!

be my next inspiration

Poetry Luck abounds this summer: here visiting friends in London my family was invited to the launch of Be My Next Inspiration, a collaboration designed to support the Young People's Laureate for London project.  It was a small but mighty affair, a pop-up stage in a London-proper narrow lane with a fair crowd and a feature we always appreciate:  civilized consumption of alcohol in a public space.

But wait--go back a second: a Young People's Poet Laureate for a city?  I mean, London is more than just a city, but I can tell you that my locality, large as it is, does not have a poet laureate of any kind, much less one dedicated to being and raising the voices of young people aged 13-25.*  And on this program was not one inspiration, but SIX young poets performing their work and representing both the wide variety of flavors to be found in the capital but also their shared experience of being young, British and susceptible to marginalization.

Here are some ways to enjoy the same poems that we heard on Tuesday night.

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The Story We All Know | Caleb Femi

I know I am the unreliable narrator of
this story
but if anyone is to tell it let it be me.
It starts as the wind blows through
the hollow torso of a concrete estate
singing like a clarinet does when bad news
drags its solemn face into a crowd of kids...

This story starts in Barking where they
tuck their wonder
under a pillow as it is too precious to
bring it into the classroom....

This story is a loop of starting,
and kids don't know where
they start and the story ends.

*************************
PhilospHer | Rakaya Esime Fetuga

home | Zia Ahmed

running like thought running from thought rattling from the constant battling
broken pieces floating tokens token gestures token jester open sesame ali baba forty
thieves forty grievances nothing to pledge allegiance with trapped in a box...


I highly recommend you watch the rest here on BBC Asian Network.

And here is this year's Young People's Laureate, 24-year-old Momtaza Mehri.  From an article in the Evening Standard:

Mehri is a Somali-Brit who grew up in Kilburn and Birmingham. For her, poetry has never conformed to one particular tradition. “I was raised in a household where there was lots of poetry around me, recited, cassette poetry that my father used to play. A lot of it wasn’t in English but I also really liked the poetry anthology taught at school — so I would go home and research and be like, ‘Oh my God, Sylvia Plath, who is this?’ I was involved in many traditions at the same time.” Moreover, she also spoke four different languages. “It was the kind of household where if you’re getting shouted at by your aunt to come downstairs, in one sentence she will use Somali, Arabic, Italian and English.” 
She immersed herself in a dawning online scene, the poetry that was beginning to be published on Tumblr and LiveJournal, and watching def poetry jams on YouTube. “I was feeding my own obsessions in my own home.”
She remains thrilled by the possibilities of this live, labyrinthine archive, which grows online every day. “It’s allowed people to access worlds they would not necessarily have been exposed to.” Her inspirations include Mourid Barghouti, a Palestinian poet, June Jordan, Amiri Baraka. “And Keats. Always.”

No Name Club | Momtaza Mehri

  
This event was sponsored by Spread the Word, the parent literary organization of the Young People's Laureate, and by BUREAU Creative Agency, which produced a publication of the evening's work.  View it here.  You should know that the Young People's Laureate for London project is in danger--there is no funding in place for next year's program.  I made my donation here and maybe you will too, to support #diversevoices and #diversebooks in our English-speaking culture.  And of course you can follow all these poets on Twitter!

The round-up today is with Mary Lee at A Year of Reading, where you always get more than a year's worth of reading.

 *However, check it out:  Montgomery County, PENNSYLVANIA, does have a Poet Laureate, and our Maryland's capital Annapolis just instituted a Poet Laureate program, which makes me think that Montgomery County, MD definitely needs one.