Greetings, book and treat people! I’m on vacation this week, but I prepared this newsletter for you before I left. It’s about the two things that have been bringing me the most joy this year: picture books and poems.
I’ve been reading a picture book every day since January, and I’ve read some truly wonderful books. These are my 12 favorites so far. If you are an adult and you don’t read picture books regularly, may I kindly suggest that you give it a try? For me, it’s been revelatory.
Poems—writing them, reading them, thinking about them, breathing them in—are keeping me going right now. I’ve read 12 collections so far this year. Scattered between the picture book reviews are links to poems I love from the authors of those collections.
Both the books and the poems appear in the order that I read them, though many of the poems do not come from the collections I read.
Words are magic.
Tami Charles (words) & Jacqueline Alcántara (art): Freedom Soup (2019)
This is a glorious, colorful story about a Haitian American girl and her grandmother making Freedom Soup together on New Year’s Day. They prepare all of the ingredients—the epis marinade for the meat, the pumpkin, and all the veggies—while laughing and dancing and listening to konpa music.
Along the way, Ti Gran shares the stories of Freedom Soup with Belle. They talk about how their ancestors in Haiti used to be enslaved, about the Haitian Revolution, and about why they still make Freedom Soup every year—not just to celebrate their freedom and honor the spirit, resistance, and lives of their ancestors, but as a reminder, as Ti Gran says, that “nothing in this world is free, not even freedom.”
The artwork is just stunning. It’s so colorful and warm, so living. The illustrations of Ti Gran and Belle dancing are especially wonderful—there’s so much movement in their bodies, so much joy, so much pride. The art captures a particular kind of kitchen magic—a blend of beloved family, sacred traditions, old recipes, pure fun, and responsibility.
In the Author’s Note, Charles writes about the woman who taught her how to make Freedom Soup—her husband’s grandmother, Ti Gran—and about why she continues the tradition of making Freedom Soup with her son every New Year’s Day.
Mary Oliver: What I Have Learned So Far
“Be ignited, or be gone.”
Kai Cheng Thom (words) & Kai Yun Ching & Wai-Yant Li (art): From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea (2017)
Look, if you want you can be a dragon, and if you’d rather be a hawk or a worm or maybe a bit of firelight, well, you can be that, too. If you want you can grow wings, or scales, or wreathe yourself in dirt or water, you can turn into a song if you want, or a wave, or maybe you’re part mountain, part dandelion, part mud. Maybe you’re a mud monster. Maybe you’re water in the mornings and clay in the afternoons and words at night. Close your eyes, spin around, pick a gender. Close your eyes, open up your heart, pick a name. Close your eyes, get quiet, change. Ready. Set. Change.
Kai Cheng Thom is one of my favorite authors so it’s no surprise I love, love, loved this picture book. I could write a less flowery review of it, but I don’t want to. It’s the sweetest, softest, wildest, most lovely book about being who you are and changing who you are. Who you are is change, mostly. Maybe you’re a kid and maybe you’re a teenager and maybe you’re an adult, maybe you’re 37-about-to-turn-38 and you still don’t know where you’re going, and what you know about yourself still shifts on the daily—whoever you are, this book is for you.
In a lot of ways this feels like the picture book version of Shraya’s wonderful book People Change. It’s whimsical and fun and wise and gentle. Be a tree, be a girl, be a smattering of stars, be a dollop of honey, be a man, be flux, be still, read this book.
JJJJJerome Ellis: The Name of that Silence is These Grasses in the Wind
“Find the ceremony in every instant.”
Kyo Maclear (words) & Gracey Zhang (art): The Big Bath House (2021)
Oh my heart, nobody told me this was a big, glorious, intergenerational celebration of naked bodies of all shapes and sizes! I could not adore this book more if I tried. During a visit with her grandmother in Japan, a young girl accompanies her grandma, mother, aunts, and cousins to the big neighborhood bath house, where they all shed their clothes. In the steam and the water and the bubbles, they scrub, soak, wash, laugh, splash, talk, and play.
The art is just outrageously perfect. Naked women and kids all over the page, enjoying the warm water, washing each other’s hair, soaking in the big bath, unashamed and free. So many bodies! So many differently shaped breasts! Maclear’s rhythmic, inviting poetry is as good as the drawings: “You’ll all dip your bodies, your newly sprouting, gangly bodies, your saggy, shapely, jiggly bodies, your cozy, creased, ancient bodies. Beautiful bodies.” I mean. All the heart eyes.
I don’t have a cultural tradition quite like the bath house in my family, but I did grow up swimming in the ocean with my mom and grandma. I remember my grandma shedding her clothes and stepping into the outdoor shower in the summers when I was a girl. It was right outside the front door, completely open and visible. She did not give a damn. And while I know this is not the case for everyone, (locker rooms can be places of shame, hurt, and alienation), I have also found such joy in the changing rooms of community pools, full of old women walking around naked and unconcerned, chattering away.
In the author’s note, Maclear writes about her girlhood visits to the bath house with her grandmother in Japan, and seeing naked bodies of all ages. “The idea that bodies should always be private and clothed wasn’t the norm, and part of my hope with this story is to share and celebrate this other way of being.” This book reminded me of the times in my life I’ve felt completely free with my body, and also free in the water.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat: I Suffer a Phobia Called Hope (translated by Fady Joudah)
“Pain has no logic. All things redeem / the grieving except your rational questions.”
Helen H. Wu (words) & Julie Jarema (art): Tofu Takes Time (2022)
Oh, what a lovely book! I adore process stories, and this is a fantastic one about making tofu from scratch. Lin is very excited to make tofu with her grandma—but it is a LONG process! As she helps NaiNai with each of the steps, asking lots of questions along the way (Ii it ready yet?!?), Lin also thinks about everything that directly and indirectly goes into making tofu: soybean seeds; soil, rain, and sunshine; thread and fiber for the cheesecloth; metal for the pot to simmer the milk in; weight and space to press it; stories to tell while waiting. In between illustrations of each step of the tofu-making process, there are whimsical drawings about all of these other processes and materials. I loved this sweet intergenerational story about a beloved recipe, family traditions, and passing on cultural knowledge. I’ve never made tofu from scratch but now I want to try!
June Jordan: Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.
“I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / GENOCIDE TO STOP”
Jason Reynolds (words) & Jerome Pumphrey & Jarrett Pumphrey (art): There Was a Party for Langston (2023)
I was about halfway through this book when I realized I had been reading the phrase “word maker”, which Reynolds uses over and over again to describe Langston Hughes, as “world maker”. This delights me, because word makers and world makers are the same. It also delights me because this book is not only a celebration of Hughes, and of Black authors and artists, but of words themselves—their physicality, music, power, and beauty.
The illustrations are full of words. The pattern of lit windows in an apartment block spells out HARLEM. In an illustration of a band, the word “BLUES” is part of the art—the ‘B’ forms the bass and the ‘S’ the saxophone. Nearly every page includes letter art like this. It’s magic. It feels like visual music.
In his author’s note, Reynolds explains that his inspiration for the story was a photograph of Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka dancing at a party to dedicate the Langston Hughes Auditorium at the Schomburg Center. He was so taken by these two beloved authors dancing! in a library! that he wanted to write a book about it.
It’s a magnificent book, funny and vibrant and playful. It’s about reveling in letters, and the importance of letting loose, and what it means to be a word maker (a world maker). “Don’t nobody dance like a word maker,” writes Reynolds. What a dance this book is.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: finding ceremony: a song for/from seven generations
“sit and the singing surrounds you. sit in the steady screams. stay and listen behind it
all for the stars and the whales and the dreams. stay for the songs that find you. stay
for the smallest sound. stay your behind right here and sit directly on the ground.
open your mouth. now give us what you found.”
Joyce Sidman (words) & Beth Krommes (art): Swirl by Swirl (2011)
This is an exquisite book. It’s a celebration of spirals in nature—millipedes and sunflowers, seahorses and ferns, the trunks of elephants and the tails of monkeys, shells and waves and tendrils. The words are sparse (”A spiral is a strong shape.” and “A spiral is a snuggling shape.”) but evocative. The art is stunning. So intricate and detailed. The textures! The colors! The patterns! Spirals of all sizes. Spirals that move and spirals that stay still. Every page is bursting with life. It’s an ode! A song! Spirals are so cool! Nature is the neatest! Math rocks! Look at the wonder of bull snakes and orb spiders and lady ferns! I mean. This book got me riled up.
Sam Herschel Wein: Community Check-In
“Mariah posts a picture of three smiles / without her and a sadness face.”
Chen Chen: In the Hospital
“No one had the time & our solution to it / was to buy shinier watches.”
James Sage (words) & Keiko Narahashi (art): The Little Band (1991)
This book is out of print. My library had it. I hope yours does, too. It is extraordinary. It is wonderment embodied. I’ve written a lot about how picture books awaken my sense of wonder and this one left me speechless.
A little band—six children in flower costumes (whimsical hats and colorful dresses), each playing a different instrument—marches into a town. They walk through the market, the town square, the outlying farms. Everyone stops to listen to their music and exclaim about how wonderful it is. The animals get excited. Everyone wants to know where the little band is from, who they are, where they’re going. The little band does not stop to talk. They just walk on through, making beauty.
I’m trying to come up something to explain the experience of reading this book—some image, some metaphor. A few things that come to mind: watching the clouds blow away to reveal, suddenly and spectacularly, the beauty of the Franconia Ridge in the White Mountains. Looking up at a tree near my driveway, on an early morning walk with my dog, still half asleep, directly into the eyes of a barred owl. A plate of doughnuts dripping with honey my family and I ate at a tiny restaurant in Greece when I was a kid—unordered, unexpected, simply a plate of utter deliciousness placed on our table by the servers. Some graffiti I saw in Boston as a teenager, on a brick wall: “Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world.”
This is a book of wordless wonderment. Unexplained beauty. Unlooked for imagination. It’s a book about unasked questions without answers. The little band is a mystery. The mystery is the wonder. They profoundly change everyone in the town. They do not explain themselves. They are too busy making music.
There’s something, too, in their certainty, in how well them know themselves. The mayor calls out to them, wanting to welcome them with a speech, but they ignore him. The people in the market ask where they come from, but they do not answer. Farmers and fishermen wave to them, and the little band doesn’t even turn around, they just keep playing their flutes and accordions. None of this is out of malice or disinterest. It’s just—it doesn’t matter. The little band plays music. Who they are is their own business. I don’t know why this moved me so much, but it did.
Yaffa: Blood Orange
I couldn’t find any of their poems online, but this is a great interview.
Randa Abdel-Fattah (words) & Maxine Beneba Clarke (art): Eleven Words for Love (2023)
This is a quiet, beautiful book about all the different words for different kinds of love in Arabic. A girl explains that in Arabic, there are eleven words for love, and her family knows them all. Each page describes one of these many kinds of love: “sunshine warm friendship”, “love that comes like a sudden breeze”, and “love that keeps growing”, to name a few. The gorgeous illustrations show all these many kinds of love and the relationships they describe: love between neighbors, friends, sisters, and lovers, love for homeland, love between animals and people.
It’s a wonderful celebration, both of the Arabic language (each kind of love is written in Arabic and then transcribed into English), and of the infinite ways we have of being in relation with each other. I imagine that many of these words and ideas don’t have exact translations, and I loved that instead of a direct translation, we get these gorgeous, poetic descriptions. This is a book that’s easy to feel. Even if I’ll never know exactly what al-Haneen (”love that aches with cherished memories of loved ones gone too soon”) means, I felt it. It’s such a creative and powerful way to tell a story.
Ellen van Neerven: Oyster Shell Necklace
“Safe travel / with shell stringed close / heartbeat close.”
Koja Adeyoha & Angel Adeyoha (words) & Holly McGillis (art): 47,000 Beads (2017)
What a beautiful book. Peyton is a Lakota kid who isn’t interested in dancing at powwow. When her Auntie Eyota asks her when, she bursts into tears and explains that there aren’t any dances for kids like her. Auntie Eyota instinctively understands her sadness and distress. The next day, she goes to speak with another elder, and asks if they’ll help design and make regalia for Peyton. Grandparent L agrees readily, and together, the two of them reach out to Peyton’s family and community for help.
I loved everything about this book, but my favorite favorite part is a series of spreads in the middle. Each page is split in half. On one side, Auntie Eyota is reaching out to folks she knows, asking them to help. She calls her sister and asks her to make Peyton’s beaded belt. She sends an email to the grandmother who taught her to bead long ago and asks her to contribute. These illustrations are so full of love. On the other side of these same pages are drawings of Peyton in distress. Her face is drawn and sad. She covers her face with her hands and crying. She looks like a kid who feels completely and totally alone.
She is struggling so much, but all around her, her people are caring for her. They’re doing the work of love. That work takes time, and while they’re beading and stitching and sewing, they’re also simply there with Peyton in her sadness—hands on her shoulder. It’s painful and yet so hopeful, so moving. I teared up.
Of course the book has a beautiful ending, as the community comes together to present Peyton with her new regalia, and affirm her identity—whoever she wants to be. It’s joyful and tender so exuberantly happy, and there’s a really wonderful and special moment between Peyton and Grandparent L.
Hala Alyan: Truth
“Hunger is hunger. I got drunk one night / and argued with the Pacific. I was twenty. I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar. I wasn’t twenty.”
Jean E. Pendziwol (words) & Todd Stewart (art): Skating Wild on an Inland Sea (2023)
Wow wow wow. This is the simplest, softest, most wintery quiet story about two kids who wake up early on a cold morning to go skating on Lake Superior. The art is extraordinary. Astounding. It gave me shivers. You might know by now how much I love winter. You might not know that the light is one of my favorite things about winter. Winter light is unlike any other kind of light. I don’t know how to describe it, but Todd Stewart knows how to draw it. The first few pages of this story are blue, all blue—that amazing pre-dawn winter blue. As the sun rises, light starts spilling onto the pages: gold, rose-pink, orange, warm-yellow, glittering, sharp, soft. There’s an illustration of the siblings walking through the early morning winter woods, bare trees, big horizon—I could look at it forever. It’s everything I love about winter, drawn and named.
Once they’re out on the lake, the colors sharpen into this clear, bright palette of blue and green and white. It’s perfect. The colors, the ice, the bare branches, the poetry. All the superlatives. The most beautiful winter song. Love, love, love. All the incandescent winter love.
Kaveh Akbar: Against Dying
“how shall I live now / in the unexpected present”
Deborah Marcero: In a Jar (2020)
This book is pure magic, pure whimsy. I don’t really even want to write about it; I just want you to read it. It’s about a rabbit named Llewellyn who collects things in jars: leaves, sticks, sunsets, seasons. One day he’s out collecting and he meets another rabbit named Evelyn, and since he has an extra jar of sunset, he gives it to her, and they become besties. They collect feathers and snow, flowers and the scent of grass—all the beautiful things you can experience alone or with another person, they collect.
But what they’re really collecting is the moments of their friendship. Or, rather: they’re doing both. They’re filling jars with butterflies and sap, and they’re filling each other up, too—with love, silliness, shared memories, ideas, comfort, silence, words, songs, secrets, moments.
The ending is the most perfect. The art! Of jars! It’s…I don’t know, it’s all the sweet things mashed up in weird shapes, it’s that feeling you get sitting around a fire in summer with your beloveds, or when you walk into your bestie’s house and their dog sticks her nose in your face. It’s all the little quirks you love about your friend, all the ordinary wonders someone who loves you asks you to notice. It’s all the colors and sounds and textures you love, carefully placed into jars—jars!—not to preserve but to remember. There’s a difference and the book knows what it is. Am I making sense? Does it matter? This story filled me up. What a gift.
Raymond Antrobus: I Move through London Like a Hotep
“When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain.”
Jarrett Dapier (words) & Andrea Tsurumi (art): Mr. Watson’s Chickens (2021)
I cannot remember the last time a book made me laugh so hard. I straight-up belly laughed the whole way through. Could not stop. Almost peed myself. Still laughing. 1000 chickens out of 10. No notes. Do yourself a favor and get this book.
Omar Sakr: Where I Am Not
“Isn’t that a wonder and a wound? / Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two.”
Of course I adore this, Laura -- pairing each book with a poem is so brilliant.
Some great recs here! I love In A Jar. I want to check out the bath house book -- we've been going to a gym that often has some nakedness in the locker rooms and I think it would be a great way to explain that.