SPIN A SOFT BLACK SONG: Poems for Children

Though some of these prose-poems seem more likely to be appreciated by an adult sensibility, others, like ""Daddies"" (they ""teach you how to walk and wear a hat and pee""), hit the mark. The verses draw on the everyday world of sneakers and Sesame Street in the context of the experience of black children, and the diction is comfortably colloquial. The author and illustrator, as they state in their introduction, have tried to recapture lost innocence in order to write for children ""cause when we were growing up"" there was little of it around, and their effort to produce positive, black poetry for kids is admirable despite occasional signs of strain (the children's faces in Bible's otherwise warm drawings look ancient). Some of the poems may be too self-conscious to reach their intended audience, but, on the whole, they're worth a try.