Clap When You Land

 

Rating: 5 for the ability to use this in the English classroom and for a solid novel in verse

My Thoughts:

Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X, and With the Fire on High is a distinctive voice in the YA market. In this novel in two voices with distinct styles of poetry for the two main characters,  Acevedo takes the real plane crash of American Airlines flight 587 that went down in November of 2021and creates a novel of grief and secrets with two daughters of one of the victims.  Camino, in the Dominican Republic, and Yahira, in New York City are only children who are used to Papi being in New York during the school year and in the Dominican Republic during the summer. Both girls have very special relationships with their fathers, but until their father dies, they do not know about each other. 

If using this in the classroom, Harper Collins has a teacher's guide that will guide discussion, including if teachers want to use this and The Poet X  as a paired reading.

As a mentor text, students can analyze craft on voice, alternate perspectives, and tone. (high school common core standards RC.3 and RC.13. In addition Teaching Books also has some ideas for using this book in the classroom. 

From the Publisher:

Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…

In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.

Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.

And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other. 

Publication Information:

Author: Elizabeth Acevedo

Publisher: Quill Tree Books (May 5, 2020)

Book length: 432 pages

Grade level: 9-12

Home (Picture Book)

 

Stars: 4 This picture book is both beautiful, buyable and easily used in the middle school classroom as a mentor text.

My Thoughts: 

This is an extended metaphor poem by one of my favorite YA authors, Matt De La Peña, on the different manifestations of home. Of course it is not a place. Of course it includes vital people and times and memories. However, what I also loved is that it also includes school and a teacher at the door of a classroom as home. I have met many students over my years who feel like school is their safe place and their home. I continue to remind my teacher candidates that this is a fact, not something made up to explain why it is so important to create a safe, loving space for learning and healing within the classroom, even in secondary. Even in college.  The author and illustrator do a superb job of bringing that home for readers.

In the middle school classroom, use this as a mentor text for an extended metaphor writing assignment. Better yet, use this as a skills lesson for essays to show how to continue to roll out an argument.

From the Publishers:

Home is a tired lullaby
and a late-night traffic that mumbles in
through a crack in your curtains.

Home is the faint trumpet of a distant barge
as your grandfather casts his line
from the edge of his houseboat.

With lyrical text and expressive artwork, Matt de la Peña and Loren Long celebrate the beauty and love found in every home, no matter its size. They show how a home is more than just a place . . . People can be a kind of home—a family and a community that cares for one another. And the natural world is another kind of home, a refuge we share with every living thing on Earth.

This deeply moving ode to the universal pull of home, whatever its form, is destined to become a new classic that will be cherished by readers of every age.

Publication Information:

Author: Matt De La Peña

Illustrator: Loren Long

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers (March 11, 2025)

Hardcover: 48 pages

ʻĀina Hānau: Birthland

 

My Thoughts:

This second collection of poetry by ʻōiwi poet Brandy Nālani McDougall takes a more academic and political stance (kū) on Hawaiʻi poetry by Hawaiian poets. In the vein of Haunani Kay Trask, this poetry is a message to and about lāhui builders and scholars. But what I find most poignant are her more personal poems, especially "The Map," for Clifford and "This Island on Which I Love You" for her husband Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez.  I understand that political poems move us forward, but the personal poems move my gut. 

From the Publisher:

‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. ‘Āina hānau—or the land of one’s birth—signifies identity through intimate and familial connections to place and creates a profound bond between the people in a community. McDougall’s poems flow seamlessly between ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i and English, forming rhythms and patterns that impress on the reader a deep understanding of the land. Tracing flows from the mountains to the ocean, from the sky to the earth, and from ancestor to mother to child, these poems are rooted in the rich ancestral and contemporary literature of Hawaiʻi —moʻolelo, moʻokūʻauhau, and mele —honoring Hawaiian ʻāina, culture, language, histories, aesthetics, and futures.

The poems in Āina Hānau / Birth Land cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people. The ongoing environmental crisis in Hawaiʻi, inextricably linked to colonialism and tourism, is captured with stark intensity as McDougall writes, Violence is what we settle for / because we’ve been led to believe / green paper can feed us / more than green land. The experiences of birth, motherhood, miscarriage, and the power of Native Hawaiian traditions and self-advocacy in an often dismissive medical system is powerfully narrated by the speaker of the titular poem, written for McDougall’s daughters.

‘Āina Hānau reflects on what it means to be from and belong to an ʻāina hānau, as well as what it means to be an ‘āina hānau, as all mothers serve as the first birth lands for their children.

Publication Information:

Author: Brandy Nālani McDougall

Publisher: University of Arizona Press (June 13, 2023)

Dark Testament: Blackout Poems

 

My Thoughts:

The metaphor of this cover is everything. We see the obvious blackout, but also the wall or even bars with the black male figure behind those bars as dark testament pushes out of the large middle white space. Even the cover is poetry. 

The clever, clever use of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, an experimental novel that centers on the grief Abraham Lincoln undergoes after the death of his eleven-year-old son, Willie, is the raw material for poet Crystal Simone Smith's celebration of black lives in the midst of mourning and grief. The timeliness of these poems seem so current, and the idea of gathering this kind of conscientization and despair through a novel featuring Lincoln as well as a cast of characters "living and dead, historical and invented" is really brilliant and cathartic. 

Smith in her introduction lays out a charge for us as readers, 

As the poet, I task you the reader with lighting a conscience flame in honor of those killed by violence and carrying that torch into a more just future. A better world is within our grasp.

The titles of Smith's poetry pay homage to individual victims. Many names are well known in the Black Lives Matter movement: Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.  But even more names were unknown to me until now. The majority of the poems carry victim names. Others connect to the movement, like "No Justice, No Peace" or "Justified Homicide." 

I found myself forgetting that these were blackout poems. They really felt like a conversation and collaboration between Saunders and Smith.  The conversation between the two authors at the end of this was especially meaningful to me as an English teacher. The writing process conversations with the authors is a gem that needs to be in our writing workshops as "advice from the trenches." 

George [Saunders]: For me, writing is a process of trying to revise the falseness and manipulation out of the prose, and, by association, out of myself. 

From the Publisher:

In this extraordinary collection, the award-winning poet Crystal Simone Smith gives voice to the mournful dead, their lives unjustly lost to violence, and to the grieving chorus of protestors in today’s Black Lives Matter movement, in search of resilience and hope.

With poems found within the text of George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, Crystal Simone Smith embarks on an uncompromising exploration of collective mourning and crafts a masterwork that resonates far beyond the page. These poems are visually stark, a gathering of gripping verses that unmasks a dialogue of tragic truths―the stories of lives taken unjustly and too soon.

Bold and deeply affecting, Dark Testament is a remarkable reckoning with our present moment, a call to action, and a plea for a more just future.

Along with the poems, Dark Testament includes a stirring introduction by the author that speaks to the content of the poetry, a Q&A with George Saunders, and a full-color photo-insert that commemorates victims of unlawful killings with photographs of memorials that have been created in their honor. 

Publication information:

Author: Crystal Simone Smith

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co. (January 3, 2023)

 

Girls That Never Die: Poems

From the Publisher:

In Girls That Never Die, award-winning poet Safia Elhillo reinvents the epic to explore Muslim girlhood and shame, the dangers of being a woman, and the myriad violences enacted and imagined against women’s bodies. Drawing from her own life and family histories, as well as cultural myths and news stories about honor killings and genital mutilation, she interlaces the everyday traumas of growing up a girl under patriarchy with magical realist imaginings of rebellion, autonomy, and power. 

Elhillo writes a new world: women escape their stonings by birds that carry the rocks away; slain girls grow into two, like the hydra of lore, sprouting too numerous to ever be eradicated; circles of women are deemed holy, protected. Ultimately, Girls That Never Die is about wrestling ourselves from the threats of violence that constrain our lives, and instead looking to freedom and questioning: 

[what if i will not die] 

[what will govern me then]

My Thoughts:

Safia Elhillo, author of the beautiful YA novel in verse Home is Not a Country, continues to find catharsis amidst personal and generational trauma in her poetry. To be a woman is to be split open and bleeding. To be a Muslim woman is to be split open and bleeding. As women, we are ruptured and broken. But the beauty of these poems is that as women, we are also whole and fierce and powerful beyond measure. 

In this year where women are losing power over their own bodies (again) Girls that Never Die by Elhillo is a feminist call to arms as females to see each other and support each other:

& when i live alone

& that man followed me

one night home from the six train

up lexington        & into the hallway

tried for hours to break open my front door

you took turns from all your cities   & stayed

overnight with me on the phone    for three days

snoring & murmuring in your sleep

(excerpt from "Ode to My Homegirls")

Publication Information:

Author: Safia Elhillo

Publisher: One World

Publication date: July 12, 2022

Ain't Burned All the Bright

 

My Thoughts:

This is a long disjointed poem, but it is not a novel in verse. It is just one long story where the art and the placement of words on the page are just as important as the pages with no words. 

"In through the nose. . .out through the mouth" That is how this book needs to be read, in through the nose, out through the mouth. The way certain lines and words repeat is so effective in the rhythm of this that as a reader it's hard to not also be an orator. It's difficult to not end up reading this out loud. Even when I wanted to stop reading out loud, I couldn't. 

This is an immersive experience of one black family's experience during this 2020 pandemic from the eyes of one of the kids/teens. The inside jacket calls this a heartbreaking-heartmaking manifesto and perhaps the double page spread image that most exemplifies that is the one with a male standing on the bottom corner of the left page facing the upper corner of the right page with his right hand up in a fist and a long shadow in front of him. Perhaps because I just read the memoir Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice about the Olympic protest on the medal platform by Tommie Smith and John Carlos, this image with the words is so powerful:

ain't nothin but a fist with a face that looks like mine

I'm definitely giving this book away. I just have to figure out who will be able to find the student that needs this book. This book is profound. The art and words remind me of the picture book illustration styling of Harlem by Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers. It is a heavy book and a heavy subject. This is definitely a book you need to buy and own and come back to.

From the Publisher:

Jason Reynolds and his best bud, Jason Griffin had a mind-meld. And they decided to tackle it, in one fell swoop, in about ten sentences, and 300 pages of art, this piece, this contemplation-manifesto-fierce-vulnerable-gorgeous-terrifying-WhatIsWrongWithHumans-hope-filled-hopeful-searing-Eye-Poppingly-Illustrated-tender-heartbreaking-how-The-HECK-did-They-Come-UP-with-This project about oxygen. And all of the symbolism attached to that word, especially NOW.

And so for anyone who didn’t really know what it means to not be able to breathe, REALLY breathe, for generations, now you know. And those who already do, you’ll be nodding yep yep, that is exactly how it is. 

Author: Jason Reynolds

Illustrator: Jason Griffin

Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Diouhy Books

Publication date: January 11, 2022

Unraveling: Poems

 

Publication date: March 8, 2022

My Thoughts:

I am not a good critic for poetry, as the poems that I like are ones that I have a visceral reaction to, but that reaction comes from different things. It just depends. In other words, I like who I like, but I cannot explain why I trust their poetic voice. What grabs me, though, is when I hear poets read their own pieces. I feel like poets reading their own pieces is part of the visceral package. 

With that in mind, I picked up this book because Brandon Leake is the Season 15 winner of America's Got Talent. I know this because the publishers put that down on the cover. I have never seen a whole season of America's Got Talent, but I have seen enough clips to know that a spoken word poet is not the typical act that gets the judges excited, so I needed to request this book.

His poetry is fine, but it sits on the page like the plastic food outside of the Japanese restaurants. It looks real enough, meaning from all outward appearances, they are recognizable as poems. However, I am missing his voice in my head. I don't know how he would read it, and since I am reading this pre-publication, Amazon does not allow me to listen to a snippet. I am guessing, especially since he is a AGT winner, that it is in the delivery, the way he enunciates the words, inserts breath and life into lines, perhaps moves his hands like Amanda Gorman does as if punctuating and pushing essence into the poems, that this is where the corpse of words turns into living material. 

From "Living" -

I'm not searching for a new beginning/I'm somewhere in the middle/Not quite hopelessly searching/Yet not quite woefully unearthing/All of these dead parts of me (p.8)

I guess, without having ever heard him read his own work, I too am somewhere in the middle. . .

From the Publisher:

From famous spoken word poet, artistic educator, and founder/CEO of “Called to Move” Brandon Leake comes his debut poetry collection Unraveling. In an era of self love, the ability to love oneself is only as effective as the ability to know oneself. Throughout his collection, Leake asks readers to look at something beautiful, yet still see its flaws. On the flip side, he encourages readers to look at something evil, and yet still see the beauty it holds.

Universally relatable, surprisingly educational, and all around powerful, Unraveling is a collection of poetry inspiring us to slow down, breathe, and read between the lines.

 

Vinyl Moon

 

My Thoughts:

Snaps to black girl magic in this multi genre book about Angel, a teen sent to Brooklyn after an incident with her abusive boyfriend. In New York, she lives with a loving, hard working uncle. At her new school, she finds a teacher who guides her to reconnect with herself and reimagine her future through the books in her room as well as through the other girls in Ms. Gʻs H.E.R. advisory (Her Excellence is Resilience & Honoring Everyones Roots). The vignettes and poems are about Angel, her dreams, her awakening, her friends, her music. But it is also a song for Brooklyn in the same way that House on Mango Street is a song about Chicago. 

For English teachers, this is a mentor text for your writers, as well as a book list of what should be in the literary American canon. If as high school English teachers, we have not offered these books to our students, are we preparing them?: 

• James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Notes of a Native Son
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Ms. Browne, through Angel, brings these writers back into the consciousness of new readers in a format that will make them curious and perhaps pick it up on their own. As an educator and a former AP teacher, I appreciate that. I remember giving my public school students The Bluest Eye for summer reading, then spending the whole summer wondering if I was going to get called in by the principal or an irate parent. I had my intention and justification papers ready, and although I never got questioned, I knew it was a risk. I also enjoyed the little rant Angel has with the librarian about what is classic and should be read and what is not valued. Using this book as a pep talk for English teachers to pay attention to this kind of student who uses reading as a window, a mirror, a sliding glass door, as well as a healing stone is an important reminder as we start to think again about creating our own curriculum and our own resources for these times of upheaval. 

Bring Vinyl Moon into the classroom as a mentor text for writing workshop. Bring it in as a stepping stone for other books. Pair it with House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros or the Oceania vignettes of Girl in the Moon Circle by Sia Figiel. Let black and brown girl magic from the diaspora vibrate through your classroom. Wouldn't that be fabulous? I am already excited to create curriculum.

Finally, when authors bother to write letters in the beginning of the book, I like to read it. I like to hear others talk about their intentionality and their "why," so I also want to honor that.

This is a story about finding your way. This is one of so many of our stories. I hope it brings you closer to sharing your voice. I hope it lights a candle in the cavern where you hide yourself. I hope it feels safe to read these voices and know they are thinking about you being and breathing. Wherever you are.  --Mahogany L. Browne

From the. Publisher:

When Darius told Angel he loved her, she believed him. But five weeks after the incident, Angel finds herself in Brooklyn, far from her family, from him, and from the California life she has known.
 
Angel feels out of sync with her new neighborhood. At school, she can’t shake the feeling everyone knows what happened—and that it was her fault. The only place that makes sense is Ms. G’s class. There, Angel’s classmates share their own stories of pain, joy, and fortitude. And as Angel becomes immersed in her revolutionary literature course, the words from Black writers like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora NEale Hurston speak to her and begin to heal the wounds of her past.

This stunning novel weaves together prose, poems, and vignettes to tell the story of Angel, a young woman whose past was shaped by domestic violence but whose love of language and music and the gift of community grant her the chance to find herself again.

 

Laughing Out Loud, I Fly

 

Juan Felipe Herrera is the US poet laureate, but I have not been keeping up with live poets as much as I should, so I did not really know that. However, he played a prominent role in the November 2020 NCTE (National Council for Teachers of English) conference so I got to hear him at this virtual affair. What struck me about him was that he is artsy and warm and whimsical, which I think makes for a great poet who can uplift people and bring hope in dark spaces. 

Listening to Herrera on Zoom was like being in his studio and listening to a favorite teacher. At one point in the keynote he brought out large pieces of newsprint and said I am going to write you a poem and I could have sworn that I was the only person in the room and he was speaking directly to me.

His book of poems in Spanish and English are like that. They are intimate and whimsical. The rhythm of his words dances. The food imagery is both playful and nostalgic. Even if I do not have similar food memories, he makes me remember a time and feel the joy that comes from the simplicity of that time and that food. 

What I most love about these poems are the titles. I know he means them to bring laughter, I found myself smiling through tears. I am not sure why, but they were not sad tears.

Some of my favorite titles:

I own many socks, some with wings

Nothing is missing, nothing, except the pineapple tamales

If I was Picasso, I would paint a crab

I was born with a tiny parakeet of hope

These are poems to experience. These are not poems to dissect like frogs. These are poems to read out loud to yourself at the park and let the wind carry them up into the sky. 

Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance

 

Nikki Grimes is on fire! Not only does this beautiful book allow these Harlem Renaissance female poets to step forward in their own power, using their own voices, but when Grimes uses the Golden Shovel poetry form originated by Terrance Hayes, these new poems are used as praise songs for the originals. 

This is the first time I have seen this form (Golden Shovel) but what a wonderful way to create voice and word play. This is also a fabulous way to take analysis out of the realm of academic "mansplaining" and into the realm of possibility and deep reverberations.  Read this book, coming out in January 2021, to see what Grimes can do with this form. 

The "rules" of Golden Shovel: 

• grab a striking line from a poem, or for short poems, take it in its entirety. Bold that striking line or poem.
• Arrange that striking line or poem in a line, word by word, in the right margin
• You then create. your new poem, keeping the borrowed line or poem as the last words of each line

The result is a lovely call and response from the ancestors to Ms. Grimes and back again. What a fabulous homage to these, until now, forgotten names that sit equal to Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. 

The Drum that Beats Within Us (Poetry)

My Thoughts:

I saw this cover on Net Galley and I immediately grabbed it because I am always looking for poetry (not novels in verse). The power of poetry and books of poetry is that it immediately immerses the reader in a time, a place, and a message to chew on based on the poet's lens. Just looking at this cover, tied to the title, I thought Indigenous, land based, lessons learned through historical trauma and survivance.

This is not it which is both good and bad. Bond is not an Indigenous poet. That is a good thing. He does not have the right to speak for the land in that way and he wisely does not try to do so. I read the reviews. Yes, there is land in these poems, but the land is generic. these "Forests Dark of Elm" could be anywhere and nowhere. In the last poem that gives this collection its name, I realize that this drum could be any drum, "primitive as stone". . ."hunts the sorrowed unicorn beneath the laurel's shade."

This type of jarring mix of ancient and mythical takes me as a reader both in a place, and quickly within a few lines out of a specific place. Are we in Europe now? We are definitely not in America. Then in three stanzas, suddenly we see the metaphor of the drum again "steady as the Bear," capitalized when buck is not. Are we talking about Ursa major now in his "northern lair?" 

This jarring back and forth between naming a specific place ("Smith River") in Montana, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran, and a specific people Micmac (Mi'kmaq) of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Islands to creating generic places, anywhere places kills the power in poetry of speaking for your community, for your people, for your trauma. It waters down the message, and makes me angry when in the poem "Children Scalped" he lists tribes (including using the colonized spelling for Micmac) and uses the very Indigenous term "we" . . ."we ran frantically/we remember/name us all." The very positive outcome to this is that he has no real message to tell. His poems are just technique. That is much better than recolonizing through false empathy. 

Poetry is such a difficult road to maneuver. If this is what is published and lauded as "good," then I also say blow it up from within (and I am not speaking as a "literary mafia").  Bond says something interesting in his introduction. He says:

. . .let's make poetry ugly in the name of something new, as Le Corbusier did to architecture. And we can appoint ourselves the prophets of this revolution. Because even crap has value if it's marketed as new.

This is crap indeed. I think about these students I have mentored over the years in my classroom who have something to say, who have poetry in their blood, who continue to be edited and watered down and pushed aside in this system that we call school. Who will hear them if this is what we are listening to? 

Between the Lines

My Thoughts:

In the development of readers, there is a term called "transitional readers." Students who will become lifelong readers or "fluent readers," hit this stage at different times in their life from upper elementary to middle school. Think back to the time when you were into books in a series because the characters became friends of yours. Think back to those authors that you trusted because their voice was comfortable, and their style engaged you. That is the transitional stage and YA books cater to that stage which is why there are so many trilogies. 

Ms. Grimes is a voice I trust for transitional readers. If readers like Jacqueline Woodson's Locomotive but want an older high school character, Grimes is a great portal to a PG version of the urban (NY), minority (mostly African American, Puerto Rican, Hispanic) experience. 

Like Grimes' Bronx Masquerade, this story highlights multiple characters, all with their own obstacles and strengths. What holds them all together is a poetry class in school and an upcoming poetry slam competition. 

Through their backstory told in prose and their resulting poem, Ms. Grimes is perfect for the reluctant male readers. As a teacher, she also seems to model her own writing process (free write/share/poem) or at least offers up some specific ideas on how to run a writing workshop in the classroom. 

Between the Lines is Grimes doing what she does best. She allows her characters to tell their own stories in their own way and opens up the neighborhood a little to let hope radiate outwards. 

Update:

Teacher guide for Bronx Masquerade and Between the Lines

The Sobbing School

Description:

The Sobbing School, Joshua Bennett’s mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, presents songs for the living and the dead that destabilize and de-familiarize representations of black history and contemporary black experience. What animates these poems is a desire to assert life, and interiority, where there is said to be none. Figures as widely divergent as Bobby Brown, Martin Heidegger, and the 19th-century performance artist Henry Box Brown, as well as Bennett’s own family and childhood best friends, appear and are placed in conversation in order to show that there is always a world beyond what we are socialized to see value in, always alternative ways of thinking about relation that explode easy binaries.

My thoughts:

March was African American history month and April is poetry month so this is both late and on time, however it is the poetry over the content that stands out for me. This is a mentor text that I can create lessons around just because of the craft of Bennett's words.

These words, the arrangement, the rhythm is best when he is talking about things that are very personal to the author.  It was a great read on the plane where I had to stay focused in a claustrophobic space so I could hear the voice in my head as I read.

For example, the way the words play on each other in "Taxonomy" makes what is dead (blank paper, blinking cursor, black letters arranged just so) look life like. And yet without the capitalization, there is just fake breath, transformation, but no real inhale, just hiccups like sobbing. 

as cormorant. as crow. as colon. as comma/as coma. as shadow. as shade. as show. 

I was almost finished with the book and still wondering why it was called The Sobbing School but the title poem on page 52 was so crafted that I lost the message and had to reread and reread. I got caught in the alliteration and could not focus on anything but how I could use this to teach breath and editing and intentionality of craft.

The Sobbing School

is where I learned to brandish the black like a club,/you know, like a blunt object, or cobalt flashes of strobe/dotting damp walls after dusk drops the dark motion/our modern world can't hold.

 Finally, I always wonder how to end these posts. I have more to say but don't want to say it. I continuously edit my thinking because certain ideas, like how exactly I would use something or what student by name needs to read this book are just my ideas. They should not add to or inhibit another person's reading. But somehow, I have an issue with closure, so I'm trying something new here. I just want to include the last sentence of whatever I am reading and maybe that will help. Maybe it will not, but I won't know until I try it on for size.

Last sentence:

Expect the flood.

My Nature is Hunger by Luis J. Rodriguez

Title: My Nature is Hunger: New and Selected Poems , 1989-2004
Author: Luis J. Rodriguez

Synopsis:
My Nature is Hunger is the first poetry collection in five years by this major award-winning Latino author. It includes selections from his previous books,Poems Across the Pavement, The Concrete River, and Trochemoche, and 26 new poems that reflect his increasingly global view, his hard-won spirituality, and his movement toward reconciliation with his family and his past.

My thoughts:
As an indigenous writer, these poems whisper and moan and shout to me, the rhythm is familiar as breath, and when Rodriguez says "you" in his poem, I imagine that he is speaking directly to me. It doesn't matter if our places are different, if our ancestral memories are different, because he speaks to my na'au (the gut where our Hawaiian knowledge lives).

My favorite stanza from "Piece by piece"

Piece by piece/ They tear at you:/ Peeling away layers of being,/ Lying about who you are,/ Speaking for your dreams.

I think as Hawaiians, when we allow others to speak for our dreams, then we have stopped paying attention to the ho'ailona, those signs from our ancestors that guide us.

My favorite one line from "Believe me when I say. . ."

writing a poem is like fathering a river

Want to teach figurative language, the power of metaphor and simile to craft our own writing? This is the poem to use.

See a great video from Open Road Media of Mr. Rodriguez talking about how books and writing saved him. 
More on the author:

Luis J. Rodríguez (b. 1954) is a poet, journalist, memoirist, and author of children’s books, short stories, and novels. His documentation of urban and Mexican immigrant life has made him one of the most prominent Chicano literary voices in the United States. Born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrant parents, Rodríguez grew up in Los Angeles, where in his teen yearshe joined a gang, lived on the streets, and became addicted to heroin. In his twenties, after turning his back on gang violence and drugs, Rodríguez began his career as a journalist and then award-winning poet, writing such books as the memoir Always Running (1993), and the poetry collections The Concrete River (1991), Poems Across the Pavement (1989), and Trochemoche (1998). He has also written the short story collection The Republic of East L.A. (2002). Rodríguez maintains an arts center, bookstore, and poetry press in L.A., where he continues writing and working to mediate gang violence.

Thank you to NetGalley and Open Road Media for reading access to this book. 

Tween Tuesday Review: A Leaf Can Be

Author: Laura Purdie Salas
Illustrator:  Violeta Dabija
Publisher: Millbrook PR Trade (February 2012)
Hardcover: 32 pages
Rating: 5 out of 5

In short:
A leaf can be many things, like a "frost catcher. . .moth matcher. . .pile grower. . .hill glow-er." Follow the whimsical text and captivating pictures through the many things a leaf can be.

My thoughts:
There is nothing better than lilting poetry packaged in an "eye-candy" picture book that immerses the reader in color and joy, except an "eye-candy" poetry book that also doubles as a teaching tool and makes science fun and approachable for reluctant tween readers. This book is a great way to learn. Not only does it pair poetry with pictures for a sensory overload experience, but it provides additional information about a leaf's function, usefulness and scientific properties as well as a glossary of key vocabulary words with kid-friendly definitions that don't compromise the "scientificness" of the words.

The book is set for a release in February and it would make a wonderful Valentine's gift to tide readers over until the leaves start to reappear in spring.

Source: This ARC was supplied by Net Galley(dot)com for an honest review.

Tween Tuesday: Shakespeare Bats Cleanup

Tween Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by Green Bean Teen Queen that highlights great reads for tweens.

Title: Shakespeare Bats Cleanup

Author: Ron Koertge

Paperback: 116 pages

Publisher: Candlewick (February 2006)

Genre: novel in verse

Rating: 4 out of 5

Source: Liliha Public Library

Review:

This novel in verse is told from the point of view of 14-year-old Kevin Boland, who while he is laid up at home for months with a bout of mono is given a journal by his writer father and writes poems from a book in his father's library. By playing with different forms of poetry, Kevin shares his thoughts on the loss of his mother, baseball and making out with girls.  Even after he's better, he continues to write poems. The genius in this type of book is that it shows young readers that poetry can be about anything. I also like it because like Locomotion (Jacqueline Woodson) and Love That Dog (Sharon Creech), the protagonist is a  young boy finding his voice for the very first time and using writing as a way to express his sorrows and frustrations.

Ho'okupu: An Offering of Literature by Native Hawaiian Women

Before I do the review, just wanted to share a picture (taken by my dad) of the first public reading of this book at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, August 2009. Twelve of the eighteen women were on stage for the reading. In this picture is (left-right) Jerelyn Makanui-Yoshida, me (at the mic), Tamara Laulani Wong Morrison, and my mom, Mililani Hughes.
 

Ho'okupu: An Offering of Literature by Native Hawaiian Women edited by Miyoko Sugano and Jackie Pualani Johnson is the first anthology to highlight native Hawaiian women. This book has been a long-time dream of Sugano, a UH-Hilo professor emeritus of English. In fact Sugano asked me for pieces over twelve years ago, so when the book came out this year, it was like being reunited with a lost child.

This anthology of poems, plays, journal entries and short stories serves as an opening for conversations on Hawaiian literature. There are pieces written in the Hawaiian language, pieces written in English, pieces written in English using Hawaiian poetry elements, and pieces written in Hawaiian creole, a product of the plantation and immigrant past of Hawaii.

Anytime there is an anthology of women writers, I find that the passion for telling their stories, for recording their lives is rich, regardless of the ethnic background. The difference here is in the undercurrent of immediacy to get the native Hawaiian voice out. These women, no matter what language they chose to write in, came from a people whose native language has been beaten out of them, whose culture has been ripped away from them. Are they angry? Some of them are apoplectic, while others show more patience and aloha, traits of a culture that survives and thrives.

Tamara Wong Morrison, poet, teacher and activitst says, "I believe we bring to writing a genetic awareness of the grief of being Hawaiian and (coping with) the cultural loss, but the writing then becomes a purging … a cleansing and a way of finding some joy to over-ride the pain." Her poems reflect that in their rant against the desecration of the rituals to the fire goddess Pele as well as the commercialization of the Hawaiian culture into ticky tacky kitsch scented in coconut oil and bottled gardenia.