MY AMERICA BLOOMS

A family flees Iran hoping to make a new life in America.

“Pack everything you don’t want to leave behind,” Maman tells the book’s young narrator, but all the child can bring of the family’s garden are a few bougainvillea petals. Using emotional free verse, Ford describes the journey to America: “Chadors flying, / smiles wilting, / courage rising skyward.” Once there, however, the family spends months “inside buildings with plastic plants,” their only glimpses of the skies seen “through oval windows.” When they finally relocate to a new neighborhood, they find unexpected harvests: a community garden plot and “row after row… / after row of welcome.” Ford’s poem talks of “my America,” incorporating kindnesses and promises, small details like a hand on a shoulder and broad feelings such as blossoming friendship. Mokhles presents colorful vignettes of kind faces in different community settings—a school, a park, a library. But “my America is / not / always / beautiful.” The garden is vandalized (with the words “You’re not welcome” scrawled over a fence); the tone turns somber and the verse angry, but only until the narrator remembers that this is a land “for all” and that “in my America, / no one can uproot / what we came / to grow.” The gardening motif keeps the tone optimistic even as author and illustrator acknowledge the ugly realities that newcomers to the United States often confront.

A poetic tribute honoring the resilience and hope of immigrants.