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STOP THAT POEM!

Name: STOP THAT POEM!
Author: Eric Ode
ISBN: 978-1-68464-223-6

by Eric Ode ; illustrated by Jieting Chen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2021

An ingenious, inspiring lesson in the crafting of poetry.

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Everywhere this kid goes, they create poems about poems.

In the opening scene, a pale-skinned kid with black hair in a pageboy carefully stacks gray rectangles containing single words in a wagon. A brown-skinned kid observes, asking “What are you making?” The answer: “A poem.” Indeed, the sequence of rectangles poetically reads, “then fall like / a warm / spring shower.” As rectangles pile higher in the wagon, a new set of lines forms, this one about a poem that soars like a kite and climbs like a tower. When the wind carries the words like pieces of paper across the landscape to create another poem, this one speaks of poems jumping up, taking flight, climbing higher. Moving from one landscape to the next, the protagonist’s poems pass like snakes through grass, float like toy boats, hang singly like laundry on a line, get carried away by a dog, nest in a tree, and so on. With each new sequence of words, a new poem emerges as the poet and the word wagon visually progress from woods, over hills, and through fields to a village, gradually attracting a diverse collection of children who are advised to “set your poem free” and watch it grow, “row by row, / rhyme by rhyme.” By assembling individual words into poems, the protagonist effectively creates the text, while dynamic, contemporary, stylized illustrations cleverly incorporate the poems into each double-page spread.

An ingenious, inspiring lesson in the crafting of poetry. (Poetry. 4-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-68464-223-6

Page Count: 36

Publisher: Kane Miller

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS

- BOOK REVIEW
LARRY GETS LOST IN THE LIBRARY
by Eric Ode ; illustrated by John Skewes

- BOOK REVIEW
HOORAY, IT'S GARBAGE DAY!
by Eric Ode ; illustrated by Gareth Llewhellin

- BOOK REVIEW
OTTERS, SNAILS AND TADPOLE TAILS
by Eric Ode ; illustrated by Ruth E. Harper

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ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Laura Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

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Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.

The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)

Pub Date: June 21, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
ON THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Sarah Jennings

- BOOK REVIEW
FIVE LITTLE BUNNIES
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Dan Yaccarino

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LOVE FROM THE CRAYONS

by Drew Daywalt ; illustrated by Oliver Jeffers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2019

As ephemeral as a valentine.

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Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.

Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.

As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)