With themes of family, love, kindness, empathy, grief, growing up, and resilience, these one hundred never-before-published poems by the beloved poet, speaker, and teacher Naomi Shihab Nye will resonate with a wide audience.
National Book Award Finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye’s Grace Notes: Poems about Families celebrates family and community. This rich collection of one hundred never-before-published poems is also the poet’s most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again.---from the publisher
240 pages 978-0062691873 Ages 13-17
Keywords: poems, family, growing up, coming of age, community, 13 year old, 14 year old, 15 year old
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“Legacy
My whole life
would not have happened without
a man whose name I do not know
who died in the snow.
He was young,
had been married only three months
to my mama’s best friend.
Walking on a wintry path in Kansas
he toppled into a snowbank, dead.
That’s it. All the information.
When he died so suddenly
my mama moved to the town
where his young bride lived,
to console her for a few months
as she got over the shock.
Her friend had a job,
so my future mama got a temporary job
selling sewing machines
and a volunteer job in a hospital,
where she met my dad
who had just landed
from the other side of the world.
See?
The snowbank.
The poor frozen man.
I owe him everything.”
I never met Naomi Shihab Nye’s mother. But I still grin when I recall how, a couple of decades ago, Naomi sent me a note in which she mentioned that her mother had been pleased by my review of Naomi’s then-latest collection of poems. At the time, I thought, ‘What a cool mom! What a nice mother-daughter relationship they must have!”
In 2021, during her mom’s ninety-fourth year, Naomi lost her mom.
GRACE NOTES contains a stellar collection of poems about Naomi’s family, friends, and critters. It covers her family’s ups and downs, as well as all sorts of personal and family issues to which young readers will readily relate. It’s, in turn, funny, sad, perplexing, and awe-inspiring. But, far above all, this collection pays homage to that very cool mom, Miriam Naomi Allwardt Shihab.
“Everyone
1.
“When my mother was a little girl at recess,
her teacher told her to run to the office for help.
I think I’m dying, she said.
My mother ran, conveyed the terrible message.
Don’t you ever say such a bad thing again!
the school secretary shouted. A nurse rushed
to the playground to find the teacher on the ground
under the swings, dead.
My mom loved that teacher so much.
She threw up, felt sick for days,
couldn’t return to school.
To carry such a hard message,
then be yelled at…
Everyone has burdens.”
“The Lie
My mother the beacon of honesty lied to me
only once. Dragged me to a beauty shop
for ‘a trim.’
Behind my back, she must have motioned
Chop it all off. I came out gloomy
as a shaved Marine.
This was reason to be mad for a week,
to hide in my room, wear beanies pulled low,
to cry, to flail
and have a long braid or two
for the rest of my life.
Or a ponytail.”
I could go on for pages, quoting the dozens of stand-out poems I savored and dog-eared. The bottom line is that GRACE NOTES is invitingly readable and shareable and re-readable. It’s Naomi’s best and most personal collection yet. Tweens in particular will cozy up to it, be moved by it, and may very well be inspired to try to write about their own family, friends, and critters.
Recommended by: Richie Partington, MLIS, California USA
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