Reception
Sharon R. Strock in her review for Library Media Connection said "Powerful words. Thinking words. Poetic words. As readers go through Ralph Fletcher’s book, they step into worlds far away—worlds found in their imaginations, their memories, and their hearts." And that "the poems are enhanced with equally intriguing b&w photos and drawings that are simple, curious, humorous, and magical. The cover with the only color found in the book doesn’t match the content, which is disappointing." [1] Jennifer Mattson in her review for Booklist said that the poems in the book "subvert the notion that poetry requires lofty themes and rarified language; many satire the dry, technical manner in which the genre is often taught, involving rote memorization of forms (which the narrator imagines getting munched by a poem-gobbler whose ingestion of haiku, cinquains, and sonnets require "some onomatopoeia / to cure diarrhea." and that "some readers may wish for flashier visuals than the understated, black-and-white drawings and photos, but others will find inspiration here to declare, like Fletcher's confident your writer, that "poems are not extinct"." [2] Lee Bock in his review for School Library Journal said "what emerges is a picture of a young writer at work, looking closely at the world, making connections, and seeing the depth and beauty of everyday events and people. Ward's black-and-white illustrations use a variety of mediums, including pencil, photography, computer-generated images, and ink. Many aspiring poets will see the reflection of their own creative spirits and aspirations in this lovely collection." [3]
Booklist is a publication of the American Library Association that provides critical reviews of books and audiovisual materials for all ages. Booklist’s primary audience consists of libraries, educators, and booksellers. The magazine is available to subscribers in print and online. Booklist is published 22 times per year, and reviews over 7,500 titles annually. The Booklist brand also offers a blog, various newsletters, and monthly webinars. The Booklist offices are located in the American Library Association headquarters in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood.
Haiku (俳句)listen (help·info) is a very short form of Japanese poetry in three phrases, typically characterized by three qualities:
- The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru). This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji between them, a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.
- Traditional haiku often consist of 17 on, in three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on, respectively.
- A kigo, usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive but defined list of such terms.
Cinquain is a class of poetic forms that employ a 5-line pattern. Earlier used to describe any five-line form, it now refers to one of several forms that are defined by specific rules and guidelines.
Pat Mora is an American poet and author of books for adults, teens and children. Her grandparents came to El Paso from northern Mexico. A graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso, she received Honorary Doctorates from North Carolina State University and SUNY Buffalo, and is an Honorary Member of the American Library Association. A literacy advocate, in 1996, she founded Children's Day, Book Day, in Spanish, El día de los niños, El día de los libros now celebrated across the country on April 30th.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds has been the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980 She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.
June Millicent Jordan was a Caribbean-American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. She used her writing to discuss issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Ben W. Howard, Emeritus Professor of English at Alfred University, is an American poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of eleven books, including three collections of essays on Zen practice, six collections of poems, a verse novella, and a critical study of modern Irish writing. For the past four decades he has contributed more than 250 poems, essays, and reviews to leading journals in North America and abroad, including Poetry, Shenandoah, Poetry Ireland Review, Agenda, and the Sewanee Review. Until his retirement in 2006, he taught courses in literature and writing and an Honors course in Buddhist meditation at Alfred University. He also taught classical guitar and performed in faculty recitals. Since 1998 he has led the Falling Leaf Sangha, a Zen practice group in Alfred, New York. "One Time, One Meeting," his monthly column, explores aspects of Zen practice.
Charles Ghigna is an American poet and author of more than 100 books for children and adults from Random House, Disney, Hyperion, Scholastic, Simon & Schuster, Time Inc., Abrams, Charlesbridge, Capstone, Boyds Mills Press, Orca and other publishers, and more than 5,000 poems, many of which appear in textbooks and anthologies, and in hundreds of newspapers and magazines from The New Yorker and Harper's to Cricket and Highlights. He has spoken at schools, colleges, conferences, libraries, and literary events throughout the United States and overseas, and has read his poems at the Library of Congress, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the American Library in Paris, the American School in Paris, and the International Schools of South America. He sometimes uses his trademark nickname Father Goose®.
Wasteland is a novel written by Francesca Lia Block and published in 2003.
Annie Finch is an American poet, writer, and performance artist. Central themes of her poetry, memoir, and nonfiction include feminism and women-centered spirituality.
Philip Schultz is an American poet, and the founder/director of The Writers Studio, a private school for fiction and poetry writing based in New York City. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including The God of Loneliness, Selected and New Poems ; Failure, winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Living in the Past ; and The Holy Worm of Praise. He is also the author of Deep Within the Ravine Viking Penguin, 1984), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; Like Wings, and the poetry chapbook, My Guardian Angel Stein (1986). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Slate, Poetry magazine, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and Five Points, among others, and he is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in Poetry to Israel and a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. He has also received, among others, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1981), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1985), as well as the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine. Schultz is also the author of a memoir, My Dyslexia, published by W.W. Norton in 2011, and a new book of poetry, The Wherewithal, published in February 2014.
Hello, Harvest Moon is a children's book written by Ralph Fletcher and illustrated by Kate Kiesler. It was first published in 2003 by Clarion Books.
Tommy Trouble and the Magic Marble is a children's novel written by Ralph Fletcher and illustrated by Ben Caldwell. It was first published in 2000.
Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid is a memoir written by the American writer, poet and educational consultant Ralph Fletcher, it covers his life from birth to age thirteen when his family moved from Marshfield, Massachusetts to Chicago.
I Am Wings: Poems About Love is a young adult book of poetry by Ralph Fletcher, it was first published in 1994. It was chosen by School Library Journal as one of their best books of 1994.
Ordinary Things: Poems from a Walk in Early Spring is a young adult book of poetry by Ralph Fletcher, illustrated by Walter Lyon Krudop. It was first published in 1997.
Relatively Speaking: Poems About Family is a young adult book of poetry by Ralph Fletcher, illustrated by Walter Lyon Krudop. It was first published in 1999.
Have You Been to the Beach Lately? is a young adult book of poetry by Ralph Fletcher with photographs by Andrea Sperling. It was first published in 2001.
Moving Day is a young adult book of poetry by Ralph Fletcher, illustrated by Jennifer Emery. It was first published in 2006.
Karl Kirchwey is an award–winning American poet who has lived in both Europe and the United States and whose work is strongly influenced by the Greek and Roman past. He often looks to the classical world for inspiration, with themes which have included loss, loneliness, nostalgia, and modern atrocities, and how the past relates to the present. While he is best known for his poems, he also is a book reviewer, award-winning teacher of creative writing, translator, arts administrator, literary curator, and advocate for writers and writing. He was director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y for 13 years, directed and taught in the Creative Writing Program at Bryn Mawr College from 2000 to 2010, served as Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2013, and is currently professor and director of the MFA Program in creative writing at Boston University.
Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales is a compilation novel of young adult horror short stories, edited by Deborah Noyes. It was published in 2004 by Candlewick Press.
James Berry, OBE, Hon FRSL, was a black Jamaican poet who settled in England in the 1940s. His poetry is notable for using a mixture of standard English and Jamaican Patois. Berry's writing often "explores the relationship between black and white communities and in particular, the excitement and tensions in the evolving relationship of the Caribbean immigrants with Britain and British society from the 1940s onwards". As the editor of two seminal anthologies, Bluefoot Traveller (1976) and News for Babylon (1984), he was in the forefront of championing West Indian/British writing.
