Young People’s Poet Laureate Monthly Book Picks

Plantains and Our Becoming, a coming-of-age memoir in poetry, is a self-described collection centered on love. When I first read this collection, I thought of it as a full-throated war cry: a request for anointment and the responding bendición. Marte writes as though she has daggers between her teeth: yes, there is sharpness in every line, but her words remind readers that blades also cauterize and heal. “It isn’t wrong to be both brown skinned and tender headed,” Marte writes, and poems such as “Smuggling a Mango Is Hard,” “Climacteric Wonders,” and “Tropical Depression” chronicle tender-hearted, fierce insights through narrative poetry, contemplative prose, and singular odes. Usually the term sweeping family saga is reserved for thick tomes of fiction, but that label feels applicable here. This is epic poetry: Marte stacks verse and prose that illuminate the inevitable social rupture of a family experiencing, spearheading, and being formed in and by diaspora while offering readers a bounty of language rooted in love of self, family, and community.

Remedies for Disappearing is both a hymn to Black girlhood and a collection of full-throated songs. It is the cry and resounding echo. This collection captures the tender-hearted but unflinchingly honest recollections of crushes and first kisses rendered in pithy and brilliant poems. It is doubtful that Patrick wrote this collection for young people, but nonetheless, I think she will find an audience in teens who crave and search for and find solace in language that reflects experiences of youth with a clear eye and masterful writing. The poems crafted from collected prom stories are particularly captivating as are the poems one would consider less directly about teenage rites (rights?)of passage: the aunties inviting Joe Morton to dinner, the speaker exiting the supermarket and considering the men who stand outside catcalling. The poems are intimate and vulnerable, and teens everywhere will be both challenged and comforted by this sharp, smart voice. 

Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam is a novel-in-verse centering around Amal Shahid, a teen artist and poet, who is convicted of a crime he did not commit. Told through poetry, Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five, a group of Black teenage boys who in 1990 were wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Central Park, and Zoboi artfully navigate Amal’s world as he depicts his home life, his trial, and his incarceration. In vivid and gutting language, Zoboi and Salaam tease out themes of truth, justice, and resilience. Although the subject matter will best be handled by teens, the language is stirring and welcoming enough that tweens may be able to handle it as a buddy-read with a parent.

In the poetry collection Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Nikki Grimes works as a guide. Throughout the collection, Grimes features a poem by one Harlem Renaissance poet and includes her own poem inspired by that poem's lines. In this way, young readers are introduced not only to a woman poet they may not have heard of but also to Terrance Hayes’s “Golden Shovel” form in which one writes after another poet's lines. Through this form, Grimes allows her poems to become familiar while the range of poets included in the collection keeps the poetry moving in unexpected directions. This is a collection that children will not only adore but will be joyously challenged by--hopefully to write their own inspired works.

You So Black by Theresa THA Songbird is a gorgeously rendered illustrated poem. In both comforting and surprising turns, “S.O.N.G.B.I.R.D” offers a plethora of lines that affirm the magnitude and magnificence of Blackness. The fact that the poem seems written to be recited and perhaps, for a general audience, gives it a sense of knowing about itself, and integrity to the verse that does not attempt to speak down to children while intentionally inviting them in through the illustration and openness of the language.

You so Black, when you smile, the stars came out.
You so Black when you’re born, the god came out….
Black with privilege,
Black with the pride…
Black on purpose— on the Black-hand side.”

I tend to look sideways at professors who assign their own books to their classes, so although I am included in Ink Knows No Borders, I hope this recommendation won’t elicit the same shady response I would typically give. I would recommend this collection even if I didn’t have a poem in it because it’s a powerhouse of a collection! In 64 poems, poets from around the world “share the experience of first- and second-generation young adult immigrants and refugees.” From chronicling first kisses, to challenging parental language regarding race, to contemplating what being a Dreamer means in the United States, this collection covers the mundane and the miraculous of being a stranger in a strange land, of attempting to make a home in a new country, yet also preserve the heritage of the old. This multigenerational collection features Martín Espada, Eavan Boland, Li-Young Lee, Ilya Kaminsky, Fatimah Asghar, and Javier Zamora, among many others. It is an anthology with a bounty of offerings.

Clint Smith follows up his incredible nonfiction debut with this return to poetry, Above Ground. In this collection, readers spend time with a speaker who is trying to make sense of the American intersections of race, violence, and family. The poems about fatherhood are uplifting and silly; the poems about gun violence in schools are heartbreaking. Smith, a well-known historian, toggles a fine line between sharply observed emotions and superb contextual offerings through a personal lens on current tensions in the United States. Both intimate and sweeping, Above Ground is a welcoming collection of poems that will challenge and comfort teen readers and their parental figures.

I’m a sucker for a well-done novel in verse. Readers get not only a narrative thread to unspool, but also elevated attention to sharp imagery and subversive language. Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo holds the story and the form in both hands, offering a tightly plotted, lovingly interior portrayal of Michael, a young Londoner. He is the son of a Greek mother and a Jamaican father, and must contend with the wound of not having his father in his life while trying to develop a sense of self pertaining to his race and his sexuality. Through drag, Michael finds grounding freedom that is reflected in the triumph and joy of Atta’s verse.

Home Is Not a Country is Safia Elhillo’s debut young adult novel in verse. The book follows a young Muslim teen navigating the life she has and the life she could have had if pivotal moments between her parents had gone differently. Elhillo’s pen game is unlike that of any other novelist writing in verse; she easily weaves through past and present, sorrow and sarcasm and pushes readers to confront the surrealism of the immigrant experience. Magical realism in verse has to be one of the toughest objectives to pull off. Fantasy often involves big world-building and large casts of characters; verse features brevity and elevates language. Elhillo is in a lane of her own—I do not say that lightly.

It’s a great luxury to focus on the work of just one writer any time you can. We live in the era of bouncy gloss – one headline to another, one voice to the next. But to bask in the study and consideration of one great person can deepen us in a more enduring way. I’ll never forget an entire satisfying week focusing on the poems of W.S. Merwin with the girls at Hockaday School in Dallas. Due to deeper focus on such great poems, we were all transported into a higher-than-usual frame of mind and mystery by the end of week. Only one person asked me why I hadn’t chosen a woman writer for a girls’ school – all I could say was, we need him right now. I think we need Ted Kooser, too. We need a whole lot more of Ted Kooser. This tribute volume containing pieces by writers who value Kooser deeply is a rich guide to his work and life. Though a two-time poet laureate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Presidential Professor Emeritus of the University of Nebraska, Kooser remains somewhat undersung. He’s a modest rural-dwelling man – uninterested in pomp, self-promotion, or flash, and his poems contain the deepest truths, perceptions, and care. They contain every human value, integrity, humor, fabulously tangible detail, and a shimmering awareness of all the connections and “coincidences” that make this life more precious. They are magical. Kudos to University of Nebraska Press for recognizing the worth of a master while he lives yet nearby. I don’t want teachers, or high-school students especially, who live in more rural, small-town environs to miss Kooser’s voice.

And thanks to any of you who’ve been reading my book picks! It’s been great fun to gather them. Thank you, Poetry Foundation, for these wonderful YPPL years!

“Another year/on the silent wheel/of the seasons/ the tide of days/coming and going…”

John Kooistra has a doctorate in philosophy, but also worked as a commercial fisherman for more than three decades in Alaska; he’s been artist-in-residence at Denali National Park. Such combinations spin magical poetry. His words radiate fortitude, elegant quiet, and meditative calm. He’s written poems to his teeth and his socks. Even when he’s writing ironically, or quizzically, the poems make you feel better about whatever you have to do: “Perhaps I should take a hint/and follow in the footsteps of the storm:/ whitewash my life, turn over a new leaf./Forget that it grows on the same old tree.” These are poems you want to copy on small cards and send to people, poems that make you calm down and smile. “…a whole life of coincidence/pushes me gently from behind…” or “This morning the phone sang./I looked at it/like a turtle had spoken.” They carry light at their ends, but also all the way through.

Of this book, Mary Karr has written, “these poems are like flowers that grow out of bomb craters, and Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishing talent to celebrate.” Kaveh Akbar has written, “…this is poetry of the highest order.” What’s so amazing about the young Abu Toha’s poems is how they feel like cleansing, refreshing tonics, invoking beauty and precious daily life, even though he lives where he was born, in Gaza, what has been described as “the world’s largest open-air prison.” These poems shimmer, without rancor or bitterness, creating a sense of space and humanity but also telling the very true story of what it is like to live in a place where massacres of innocent civilians, too often children, occur regularly and rubble from Israeli bombardment abounds: “Every day I set foot in the maze…” At an even younger age, Abu Toha founded the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library, which continues to support cultural activities. He has been a Visiting Poet at Harvard University and has since returned with his wife and three kids to Gaza, where their families remain. These poems will transport you into a realm of deepest humanity and never-ending hope. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Read an excerpt from this book!