How to Write a Poem
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Publisher Description
In this evocative and playful companion to their New York Times bestselling picture book How to Read a Book, Newbery Medalist Kwame Alexander teams up with poet Deanna Nikaido and Caldecott Honoree Melissa Sweet to celebrate the magic of discovering your very own poetry in the world around you.
Begin
with a question
like an acorn
waiting for spring.
From this first stanza, readers are invited to pay attention—and to see that paying attention itself is poetry. Kwame Alexander and Deanna Nikaido’s playful text and Melissa Sweet’s dynamic, inventive artwork are paired together to encourage readers to listen, feel, and discover the words that dance in the world around them—poems just waiting to be written down.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emphatic and rhythmic verse instructs readers about the titular subject in this wonder-filled companion to Alexander and Sweet's How to Read a Book, in collaboration with poet Nikaido. An opening suggestion encourages openness ("Begin with a question,// like an acorn/ waiting for spring") and beckons readers to take "dive deep into the silent sea// of/ your/ imagination." As vivid descriptions capture sensations of creativity, imperative lines build toward a prompt to put pencil to paper and share the result. Natural motifs weave throughout as children of varied skin tones ecstatically "listen to the grass,/ the flowers,/ the trees—anything// that's friends with the sun." Sweet's striking mixed-media collages use handmade and vintage paper, watercolor and gouache techniques, and even pebbles as they visualize the text's expansive energy via wheels, circles, and spheres. The range of techniques in use supportively connects the ideas of creativity and remixing. The result is a highly welcoming invitation to write that makes clear poetry is for everyone—reader and writer alike. Creator notes conclude. Ages 4–8.
