For National Poetry Month

It's certainly not your grandma's poetry.  Last week Gill Sotu and a couple of other slam poets performed in my daughter's high school English class, in celebration of National Poetry Month.  The students then attempted to write some slam poetry of their own.  My daughter enjoyed this workshop quite a bit.

National Poetry Month began in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, and is now held every April.  During the month of April, schools, libraries, booksellers, poets, and  bloggers throughout the U.S. celebrate poetry by participating in readings, festivals, workshops, and other events.


All month long, I've noticed numerous posts devoted to poetry and National Poetry Month on various book blogs, including Savvy Verse and Wit and The Parrish Lantern.  This morning, I encountered  book spine poetry on Leslie's blog, Under My Apple Tree, and decided to try "writing" a poem in this way.  The idea is to form a short poem using the titles of books.

I am the messenger

Dancing with gravity

Outside the ordinary world

Perfectly untraditional.

Creating a poem from the titles on book spines was harder than I thought it would be.  At first, I had the idea to use titles from books of poetry, but I found that the ones I had on hand (several chapbooks of poems by Sweta Srivastava Vikram), were too thin to show the titles.  So I decided to use novels instead.  I've read each of the books shown here, and reviewed three of them (I Am the Messenger by Markus Zusak, Dancing with Gravity by Anene Tressler, and Perfectly Untraditional by Sweta Srivastava Vikram).

Have you been celebrating National Poetry Month? Your comments, especially written as poems, are welcomed.

I Am the Messenger

First published in 2002 in Australia as The Messenger, winner of the 2003 Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Award (and numerous other awards), this young adult book by Markus Zusak was later released in the U.S. as I Am the Messenger. In 2008, I Am the Messenger was adapted for the stage by Ross Mueller, and was performed that year by The Canberra Youth Theatre.

If you read a brief synopsis of I Am the Messenger, you may be underwhelmed. I was. Before I read this book, which my 12-year-old daughter insisted that I read, the basic premise of the book didn't immediately lure me in: a young man stops a bank robbery, and his life is changed when he receives mysterious cards in the mail. The story is so much better than it sounds.

I Am the Messenger is the story of 19-year-old Ed Kennedy, an underage cabdriver who is hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey (who apparently cares about him too much to date him). Ed leads a pretty humdrum existence--driving folks around, playing cards with his mates, Marv, Ritchie, and Audrey--until the day when his luck suddenly changes. Standing in a queue when a bank robbery takes place, Ed accidentally foils the gunman's escape, and is called a hero. Soon after this event, he receives an ace in the mail from an unknown source, and the mystery begins. On the ace is a handwritten list of three addresses and times.

"Who would send me something like this? I ask myself. What have I done to get an old playing card in my letter box with strange addresses scrawled on it?"
~ I Am the Messenger, Markus Zusak

He doesn't know what awaits him at each address, and receives no guidance along the way. But this reluctant hero cares enough to find out what he needs to do, and completes his task at each address. This is a new beginning for Ed. Throughout the book, he receives different playing cards in the mail, which direct him toward new places, people, and tasks.

This book is incredible. I didn't expect to like it even half as much as I did. I loved the character of Ed Kennedy; his self-effacing and genuine manner won me over almost from the start. Ed has a dog named the Doorman, who enjoys drinking coffee. Humor abounds in this book, and the characters seem like real people. I hated Ed's mean mother, although I did understand her better after a while. The book is full of mystery, suspense, action, and also thought. It's the kind of book you don't want to put down, the kind of book you need to experience firsthand. The message of the book is about caring for others--but it's never corny nor clichéd. Does it sound like I loved this book? Because I did. Markus Zusak is an exceptional writer, and I was charmed by this book.

I Am the Messenger has some profane language (the author uses the word 'arse' an awful lot, must be Aussie slang), and references to sex, neither of which I knew about until after my daughter read it (how much should we censor the books our children read?), so although it's a book for young adults, it's probably best for older young adults--and adults, too, definitely.


Markus Zusak is an Australian writer, and the story takes place in suburban Australia. This is my first book for the Aussie Author reading challenge.

The Book Thief: The Power of Books

So many people raved about this book by Markus Zusak that I had to get a copy of it for myself. However, once I did, I put The Book Thief on a shelf under some other books. I wasn't sure I was in the mood to read a book for young adults. However, when I started reading it, I wondered if it really was intended for children. The book's major themes are rather adult in nature: the power of books and reading, love and compassion, brutality, the Holocaust, war, and death. In fact, the narrator of the story is Death, although not a mean and conniving death, but a gentle and sometimes even humorous presence, a "reluctant collector of souls". I've since learned that The Book Thief, published in 2005, was originally published in Australia as a book for adults.

The Book Thief is the story of a young German girl, Liesel Meminger. While traveling to Molching, a small town outside of Munich in Nazi Germany, Liesel's baby brother suddenly dies. In a snowy graveyard Liesel steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook. At this point, Death, the narrator, becomes intrigued by the girl and starts to tell her story. She's given to foster parents, Hans and Rosa Hubermann, for reasons that she does not yet comprehend (her biological mother has been labeled a Kommunist and is taken away). Despite Rosa's obstreperous and frequent swearing, Liesel feels secure and loved by her foster parents. She develops a special bond with her foster father, a gentle soul with silver eyes who patiently helps her learn how to read. Throughout the story her love of reading grows and becomes more significant, and she "picks up" a few more books. Liesel becomes best friends with a boy named Rudy ("with hair the color of lemons"), goes to school, and life is pretty good, although she's still haunted by her brother's death. But soon everything changes for the worse. As Germany prepares for WWII, Jews are threatened and taken away, and the Hubermanns, who oppose this senseless brutality, hide a Jew named Max Vandenburg in their basement. Germany's brutality toward Jewish people, and to those helpful to Jews, is a dominant theme in this book.
Throughout the book, Liesel is drawn in by the power of words and books and reads at every opportunity, sometimes aloud to others. She learns the significance of words--words in her books that help her escape from a bleak life, as well as words which hold the country under the hideous control of Hitler and the Nazi party. Hitler's autobiography and book of political ideology, Mein Kampf, is important in several ways in The Book Thief.
Let me stop now--before I give away too much of this book. The Book Thief is quite original, touching, and beautifully written. It brought to mind two other books I've read about the horrors of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi, and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. In 2007, The Book Thief won the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award and the Boeke Prize, and in 2009 it became a bestseller on the NY Times' list of children's books. I cannot recommend it highly enough, especially to adults.
If you've read The Book Thief or have a related thought, please leave a comment. For another review of this book, please visit The Reading Life.