Language and Literature

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Latham, I., Waters, C., Qualls, S., & Alko, S. (2018). Can I touch your hair?: Poems of race, mistakes, and friendship . Minneapolis: Carolrhoda Books. ISBN: 978-1-5124-0442-5 SUMMARY: Irene Latham, who is white, and Charles Waters, who is black, use this fictional setup to delve into different experiences of race in a relatable way, exploring such topics as hair, hobbies, and family dinners. ANALYSIS: Two classmates serving as stand-ins for poets Latham and Waters, reluctantly pair up on a poetry-writing project and reflect on their identities, relationships, and the role race plays in their lives, in more than 30 candid, thought-provoking poems. The students aren’t initially close (“She hardly says anything. Plus, she’s white,” thinks talkative Charles after being assigned to work with Irene), but that soon changes. The children’s passions and preoccupations are revealed in poems that explore topics in parallel such as new shoes, dinnertime, parental pu...

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Holt, K. A. (2015). House arrest . San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN: 978-1-4521-5648-4 SUMMARY: Timothy is sentenced to house arrest after impulsively stealing a wallet and he is forced to keep a journal into which he pours all his thoughts, fears, and frustrations. ANALYSIS: Twelve-year-old Timothy has a probation officer, a court-appointed psychologist, and a yearlong sentence of house arrest. He also has a 9-month-old brother who breathes through a trach tube that frequently clogs. Heavy oxygen tanks and a suction machine are as loud as a jackhammer are their everyday equipment. Timothy’s crime: charging $1,445 on a stolen credit card for a month of baby Levi’s medicine, which his mother can’t afford, especially since his father left. The text shows illness, poverty, and hunger to be awful but barely acknowledges the role of, for example, weak health insurance, odd considering the nature of Timothy’s crime. The family has nursing help but not 24/7; the real ...

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grandits, J. (2007). Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems . New York: Clarion Books. ISBN:978-0-618-56860-4 SUMMARY: A 15-year-old girl named Jessie voices typical and not so typical teenage concerns in this unique, hilarious collection of poems. Her musings about trying out new makeup and hairstyles, playing volleyball and cello, and dealing with her annoying younger brother are never boring or predictable. ANALYSIS: This crafty collection of poems is an expression of Jessie’s, a fifteen-year-old girl, words and thoughts about the world and people around her. The poems express her emotions of having a bad hair day, choosing friends, and even her super annoying brother. Her laughable, sarcastic take on high school life is shown through concrete poetry: words, ideas, and design that combine to make pictures and patterns. The illustrations and text really make each poem magical. Blue Lipstick is a great example of young adult poetry, the poems are told in the first person an...

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Florian, D. (2003). Autumnblings: Poems & paintings . New York: Greenwillow Books. ISBN: 0-06-009278-5 SUMMARY: A collection of poems that portray the essence of the season between summer and winter. This collection of poems and paintings welcomes fall with all the crisp energy of a joyful tumbling run. ANALYSIS:   the wordplay in this fall bouquet of poems seem slightly worn, while repeated and obvious puns often strain for effect. For example, "What to Do with Autumn Leaves" instructs readers to " leave them"; the same pun recurs in "Symmetree" ("The leaves all leave") and in "Awe-tumn" ("Autumn leaves/ Leave me in awe"). Similarly, the device of seeing the word "fall" displayed as if the letters were falling is less effective, as other poems recycle the same device. Florian's paintings, on the other hand, are fresh and childlike (e.g., the bite taken out of the apple shown for ...

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wong, J. S., & Chodos-Irvine, M. (2006). Apple pie 4th of July . Orlando: Voyager Books . ISBN:0-15-202543X SUMMARY: Shocked that her parents are cooking Chinese food to sell in the family store on an all-American holiday, a feisty Chinese American girl tries to tell her mother and father how things really are. She fears that the food her parents are preparing to sell on the Fourth of July will not be eaten, but as the parade passes by and fireworks light the sky, she learns a surprising lesson. ANALYSIS: this carefully honed story about a girl's experience as a first-generation Chinese-American. Readers first encounter the unnamed narrator as she looks unhappily out the glass door of her parents' market, open for business even on the Fourth of July. Hearing the "boom, boom, boom" of the approaching parade, sniffing the apple pie baking in a neighbor's oven, she is distracted by the cooking smells from the store's kitchen, where he...

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grimes, N., & Zunon, E. (2015). Poems in the attic . New York: Lee & Low Books. ISBN:978-1-62014-027-7 SUMMARY: A young girl learns much about her mother as she reads a collection of poems written before she was born that capture her mother’s memories of living around the world and growing up as a child of an Air Force serviceperson. Reading the poems and sharing those experiences through her mother’s eyes, the young girl feels closer to her mother than ever before. To let her mother know this, she creates a gift: a book with her own poems and copies of her mother’s poem. When she returns her mother’s poems to the box in the attic, she leaves her own poems too, for someone else to find, someday. ANALYSIS: During a visit to her grandmother's house, a seven-year-old African-American girl discovers poems her mother wrote in her youth, giving the daughter a window into her mother's peripatetic upbringing as an Air Force brat. Grimes alternates between th...