Techically, It's Not My Fault (Poetic Form)

(Book Cover Compliments of Barnes and Noble)

Bibliography

Grandits, John. Technically, it’s not my fault : concrete poems. New York: Clarion Books. 2004. ISBN 9780618428335

Review

In a creatively irreverent and decidedly laugh-out-loud style, Grandit explores the daily musings of an 11-year old boy named Robert.  Grandit’s concrete poems are masterpieces built from over 30 different fonts arranged in whimsical as well as technical shapes. Readers will enjoy rotating and revolving the book to follow the text. Poems on Robert’s ordinary issues cover homework, his crazy sister, skateboarding, and mowing the grass.  Readers will delight in Robert wrapping his sister’s algebra homework around a firework tube and seeing it arc then shower down in random numbers on the page. Robert’s eccentric side is also seen in poems touching on the history of farts, the school bus that eats children, and inventing a spew-inducing roller-coaster. The “Spew Machine” carries readers across the page through red flames, waves of water and poisonous black spiders only to be shot from a cannon at the end, but saved by a parachute. The red, black, and white colors are masterfully used to help create Grandit’s crisp, playful images.  Children in grades 4-8, especially boys, will be sucked in to Robert’s engrossing world.

Lemonade (New Poetry Book)

(Book cover compliments of Titlewave)

Bibliography

Raczka, Bob. Lemonade, and other poems squeezed from a single word. Ill. by Nancy Doniger. New York: Roaring Books Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-59643-541-4

Review 

Raczka’s crazy poems are as much a puzzle to solve as poetry to enjoy. Each of the 22 poems begins as a single word title from kid life…lemonade, vacation, playground, earthworms. Each short poem is then constructed using only the mixed-up letters from the title word. Challenging to read (and certainly even more challenging write) the jumbled letters cascade down the page in an order that forms the words of the poem. For the reader who wants to see if they “solved” the poem correctly, the backside of the page reveals the poem in a more traditional one word per line format. Some are silly “vacation”: “action/in/a/van” while others are more profound “constellation”: a/silent/lion/tells/an/ancient/tale.”  Framed by a red, yellow, black color scheme, the sparse poems are complimented by Doniger’s unobtrusive black and red watercolor illustrations. Sometimes Raczka’s poems even take on a concrete poem shape as in “Treehouse” where the words spill down the page complimenting the ladder illustration beside it that leads up to the treehouse. Drawing on the fun of riddles and anagrams, Raczka’s book squeezes poems from the most unsuspecting words that will inspire readers to attempt their own one word poems.