Celebrate Picture Books notes that author Roxane Orgill “recreates the syncopation of jazz and the exhilaration of the photo shoot in twenty poems that capture the sights, sounds, conversations, horseplay, and vibe of that special day that forever commemorate the Golden Age of Jazz.” In playful verse and vibrant images, this book captures an amazing real-world moment from 1958, when Esquire magazine and graphic designer Art Kane brought together a group of 57 beloved jazz musicians to be photographed outside a Harlem brownstone. Jazz Day: The Making of a Famous Photographby Roxane Orgill (illustrated by Francis Vallejo)

A Kirkus starred review notes that the poems honor “the ability of young readers to navigate syntax, imagery, and wordplay… a thoughtful exploration of nature expressed in poetry that should open the eyes of children to unseen worlds.” In this collection of 21 playful poems by kidlit master Jane Yolen, readers learn all about the things beneath the Earth’s surface: subways, fossils, pirate treasure, caves, magma, and even tectonic plates. Thunder Underground by Jane Yolen (illustrated by Josee Masse) Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something.”Įach of the following picture books all are a “making toward something” that’s remarkable thanks to their use of poetic forms and a keen sensibility for language. “A poem … can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the–not always greatly hopeful–belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. This is as true in well-written picture books as it is in the classic “adult” poems of Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, or Yusef Komunyakaa.Īs I think about which relatively-recent picture books most embrace the wonders that poetry offers, I recall what Romanian-born German poet Paul Celan once wrote: One of the pleasures of reading poetry is to witness the urgency, the intensity, and the sheer beauty of language.

Journey by Joyce Carol Thomas