With his two children as semi-silent partners, and the evident intent of appealing both to poetry lovers and budding philologists, restaurateur/performance artist Hirsch pairs two dozen easy-to-read poems with harder-to-read (and far longer) explanatory footnotes—all rescued from pedantry by dazzling wordplay and infectious enthusiasm. A graduate degree is helpful but not required. After opening with a “Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral” introduction in which he takes issue with Archibald MacLeish’s “A poem should not mean / But be,” he offers a disguised alphabet—“Abie’s seedy effigy / Eight chide Jake: a lemon / O peek. . . . ” More samples include ear rhymes and eye rhymes (followed by a “Ewe Rhyme”), palindromes, spoonerisms, acrostics, concrete poems, and puns. Beneath, in smaller type, he expands on literary and historical references, explores word derivations, defines homographs, homophones, and homonyms, or goes off on daffy tangents. Ha, yet another New Yorker artist to break into children’s books, debuts with scatterings of small, brightly colored, Adobe-generated geometric or semi-abstract shapes that float within, or dash across, the pagescapes with postmodern zest. The meaty-though-seldom-serious commentary enhances the experience of reading the poems, but is likely to lose less-well-read children. Still, Hirsch delivers the idea that words are for playing with in any number of refreshingly clever ways. (Poetry. 11+)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-36344-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
An intimate novel that beautifully confronts grief and loss.
It’s 1983, and 13-year-old Indian American Reha feels caught between two worlds.
Monday through Friday, she goes to a school where she stands out for not being White but where she has a weekday best friend, Rachel, and does English projects with potential crush Pete. On the weekends, she’s with her other best friend, Sunita (Sunny for short), at gatherings hosted by her Indian community. Reha feels frustrated that her parents refuse to acknowledge her Americanness and insist on raising her with Indian values and habits. Then, on the night of the middle school dance, her mother is admitted to the hospital, and Reha’s world is split in two again: this time, between hospital and home. Suddenly she must learn not just how to be both Indian and American, but also how to live with her mother’s leukemia diagnosis. The sections dealing with Reha’s immigrant identity rely on oft-told themes about the overprotectiveness of immigrant parents and lack the nuance found in later pages. Reha’s story of her evolving relationships with her parents, however, feels layered and real, and the scenes in which Reha must grapple with the possible loss of a parent are beautifully and sensitively rendered. The sophistication of the text makes it a valuable and thought-provoking read even for those older than the protagonist.
An intimate novel that beautifully confronts grief and loss. (Verse novel. 11-15)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304742-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512373-5
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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