"Every cell of their bodies says Make Art": The 2023 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Abstract

By "dwell[ing] in Possibility" (Dickinson), the poetry contained within each of this year's award winner and honor books resonated with the judges in making its subject matter new. Like Savage, Nelson uses her art to capture vivid instants, single breaths of human life that may change our view of broader swaths of time. True to her subtitle, The Shape of a Sculptor's Life, Nelson constantly probes the implicit analogy between Savage's art and Nelson's own poetry as a way of examining the meaning of art and the significance of an artist's life. (43) The linking of "creation," "potential," and "freedom" for the Black artist and the woman artist in the poem is significant in developing and recovering the portrait of Augusta Savage the artist.

Winner:

Nelson, Marilyn. Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life. Little, Brown, 2022.

Honor Books:

Goade, Michaela. Berry Song. Little, Brown, 2022.

Latham, Irene, and Charles Waters. African Town. G. P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2022.

Reynolds, Jason. Ain't Burned All the Bright. Illustrated by Jason Griffin, Atheneum, 2022.

This year was remarkable in terms of the volume of poetry published for young readers, but there were a few selections—written by well-known and first-time poets—that rose to the top for the judges.¹ Within the larger field of poetry for young readers, this year's award winner and honor books (including a biography in verse, a historical multivoiced verse novel, a picture book, and an illustrated poem) focused on the possibilities of poetry as an artform. Possibility, not just in form but in content as well, emerged as one of the major through lines in the poetry published in 2022 for young readers. The poets for young readers explored in this essay examined the distant and recent past and its connection to our present moment in works that were both deeply archival and meditative upon the life of the artist. As Matthew Zapruder notes in his introduction to the 2022 edition of The Best American Poetry, "I think this is what people often mean when they say they want to be surprised by a poem, not only by its content, and not by mere decoration of that content, but by a feeling of possibility itself, manifested in language. It's amazing how … the lyric can still push everything else away and create a dangerous space of possibility" (xxi). By "dwell[ing] in Possibility" (Dickinson), the poetry contained within each of this year's award winner and honor books resonated with the judges in making its subject matter new.

Poetic and lived possibilities distinguish our winner this year, Marilyn Nelson's Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life, a slim collection of biographical poems interspersed with photographs of Savage's sculptures dedicated to recovering and celebrating the life of the titular Harlem Renaissance artist and first recorded Black gallerist. Nelson has long explored how poetic structure and artifice can communicate the texture of the human. A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), for instance, is a heroic crown of sonnets: a set of fourteen sonnets in which the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next, with a concluding fifteenth verse composed of all the first lines of the preceding fourteen. Nelson's work is remarkable not solely for her formal virtuosity but also for her ability to coax life onto the page—and, in particular, to communicate dreams, tragedies, and nuances of African American experience to young readers. Nelson has never been one to talk down to young people, and Augusta Savage, while freer in form than A Wreath for Emmett Till, is an unabashedly complex work of YA verse. Yet we were impressed by its relatable, absorbing, and teachable storytelling of a little-known and remarkable life.

As described in Nelson's verse, as well as an elegant biographical essay provided in an afterword by Schomburg Center curator Tammi Lawson, Augusta Savage (1892–1962) was a groundbreaking figure sculptor who worked within the Harlem Renaissance, founded her own arts school in Harlem, and taught a number of younger artists, including Jacob Lawrence, yet she was little-recognized by her death. Nelson explores Savage's difficult childhood in Florida; flight to New York and entry into the Harlem artistic milieu; struggles to secure funding, training, and recognition; and finally, semiretirement in a quiet upstate New York village, with Nelson's sculptures featuring as prominent characters at every stage of the story. In one endearing accompaniment to the bust of a young girl Leonore (1935), the child model provides a glimpse into the artistic process:

It wasn't easy

to sit still so long,

while Missus Savage

looked at me with narrowed eyes,

stepped close to gently push me

a tiny bit to one side,

or straightened the big red bow

Muh-Dear pinned to my sundress

to look like a butterfly

choosed my shoulder to rest on.

… … … … … … … . … .

My bees buzzed louder, louder,

they said Tell Missus Savage

you got to wee-wee!

(48–49)

In this child's finely observant yet ultimately comically urgent account, we experience Savage's attention to children, whom she portrayed often and taught at her own studio school. This commitment makes Savage a particularly fitting choice for youth biography. Nelson's account of Leonore also illustrates this poet-biographer's sculptor-like ability to shift scale: from the grand historical import of having Marcus Garvey sit for a bust to a favorite recipe for chicken foot soup. Like Savage, Nelson uses her art to capture vivid instants, single breaths of human life that may change our view of broader swaths of time.

True to her subtitle, The Shape of a Sculptor's Life, Nelson constantly probes the implicit analogy between Savage's art and Nelson's own poetry as a way of examining the meaning of art and the significance of an artist's life. Nelson's affinity with Savage's sculpture drives her use of concrete poems. We noticed concrete or shape poems in several of our considered works this year, with varying success. Even Nelson's concrete poems—such as "Fingers Remember," which draws lines of verse across the separate fingers of a hand—sometimes look a bit awkward on the page next to the photos of Savage's vital and elegant creations (10). Then again, this very human touch draws our attention to the act of making—its thrills, its limitations—as well as to the act of viewing or reading—its challenges, its rewards.

In an early poem, "Making," Nelson meditates upon the tactile and transcendent act of creation: "Before I knead, clay / is white canvas, empty page, / a night without dreams" and "Shapes I remember / with the tips of my fingers / emerge, and confess" (14). These stanzas' lines connect the artist's medium to the artist's mind; here, dreaming and memory are translated through the body, the palms, the fingers. Nelson interprets the embodiment of sculpting as something that bursts forth as a confession, emphasizing the ways in which art acts as a witness and declaration. The tercets in these six stanzas build the momentum of the poem and further underscore the spiritual nature of artistry. The poem moves through the awe of creation and destruction, as well as the wonder of what the "eyes" and "fingers" can take in, and ends with the lines, "As we make the tools / that will form our creation, / our work defines us" (14). While the poem begins with the first-person "I," it gradually shifts into the collective "we" and "us," emphasizing the way artistry itself begins with the singular creator and moves into the community of other artists and the audience. Much like "Fingers Remember," "Making" ruminates on the process of making art and visually echoes the hand with its slightly longer second lines within each tercet. While the concrete or shaped form of "Fingers Remembered" clearly alludes to the hand, "Making" more subtly references the fingers and palms of the sculptor in motion.

In an ekphrastic poem entitled "Studio," Nelson begins with an epigraph that reads, "After Kerry James Marshall's painting of the same title, and remembering and imagining the Savage Studio of Arts & Crafts" (43). This poem is an interesting pair to the other shaped or concrete and ekphrastic poems woven throughout the collection in that it references Marshall's contemporary 2014 painting (as opposed to Harlem Renaissance era sculptures and images), and it speaks to the ways in which Nelson is placing Savage's work in context with other Black artists across history. Marshall's vibrant painting depicts multiple Black artists at work creating in an artist's studio space, and as the MET's gallery notes explain, Marshall's Untitled (Studio) "is in part about that discovery of a Black artist's workshop. … [i]t is also a majestic ode to the job of the artist, the history of painting, and the multiple possibilities that still pump through the heart of its practice." This discovery is made manifest in Nelson's imagining of the Savage Studio of Arts & Crafts: "They were born with a compulsion / deeper than skin-deep, deeper than Black: / Every cell of their bodies says Make Art" (43). The poem goes on to explore what it means to create for the Black artist:

Here in the studio's silence,

artists demonstrate that freedom means

exploring unlimited potential,

playing a part in creation.

(43)

The linking of "creation," "potential," and "freedom" for the Black artist and the woman artist in the poem is significant in developing and recovering the portrait of Augusta Savage the artist. As the poem notes, "Art rebuilds our hope for a shared future / it restores our courage, revives our faith" (43).

Augusta Savage thus invites young readers into philosophical inquiries into the meaning and purpose of creative work. In two blank verse poems "Crows" and "Awake" near the end of the book and of Savage's life, the artist (or poet) muses:

What if to taste and see, to notice things,

to stand each is up against emptiness

for a moment or an eternity—

images collected in consciousness

like a tree alone on the horizon—

is the main reason we're on this planet?

(92)

Further, "Suddenly I woke in the midst of life, / aware suddenly of the misseds of life, / who disappeared into the mists of life" (94). The imagery, metaphor, and language play of these poems asks the reader to pause and remain in the same mode of questioning and contemplation that the speaker of the poem finds herself in. The repeated words and sounds in the poem "Awake"—"woke" and "aware"; "suddenly" and "disappeared"; "midst," "misseds," and "mists"; and "of life"—encourage the reader to revisit each syllable, reread each line, and "notice things." What greater gift to a young person than this frankly conversational yet deeply spiritual call to creativity? Philosophy crackles with the spark of life in Nelson's sculptural verses and in the thrilling, frustrating, fearful, and comical details of Savage's story.

Nelson's account of Savage is a standout example of a major current in our reading this year: women's biographies in verse. Poetry published in 2022 centering or featuring women's biography included Jeannine Atkins's Hidden Powers: Lise Meitner's Call to Science, Ibi Zoboi's Star Child: A Constellation of Octavia E. Butler, and Aida Salazar's A Seed in the Sun, the latter a historical verse novel that counts Dolores Huerta as a character. Authors for young readers are turning to verse to communicate archival discoveries of remarkable women's journeys; explore the tensions, dilemmas, threats, and joys of women's ceiling-shattering careers in wide-ranging fields; and imaginatively recreate how these figures formed genius out of the prosaic and pragmatic experiences of everyday life in an unequal world. Collectively, these works offer young readers not only the exhilaration of encountering genius but also a useful playbook for being brilliant in a sexist and racist world.

Carrying this theme of deeply researched historical storytelling in YA is our first honor book: Irene Latham and Charles Waters's African Town, an epic account of the founding of Africatown (formerly African Town), Alabama, a still-thriving community created by survivors of the Clotilda, the last-known ship to smuggle African captives into US slavery in 1860. While the last decades have greatly broadened young readers' access to stories about the Middle Passage and the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas, including Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, and Nikkolas Smith's 2021 picture book Born on the Water, African Town is distinguished partly by its sweep, as we follow several people beginning with their early lives in today's Benin. As these individuals are kidnapped and thrown together, forced across the Middle Passage, and enslaved in Alabama in the years before and during the Civil War, we follow their memories, meditations, forging of powerful friendships, romances, and eventually raising of children. After emancipation, the group struggles and strategizes for years to find a way to voyage back home before eventually carving out their own piece of Alabama to create a self-supporting, self-governed settlement based in West African customs. Because the main characters, who are all based in true historical figures, long seek a way to return to their original homes, the story is anchored in these individuals' cultural and linguistic identities and their efforts to hold true to their values. As Kupollee reflects, even years after losing his home, "my / mind is a hoe, turning the soil of memory" (293).

The group writes to the American Colonization Society for help but never receives an answer. Eventually accepting their inability to fund homeland returns for the full group, they resolve to build a new home together. Latham and Waters imagine these people's daily struggle to keep alive the dream of return while also honoring their living in the present, among and for each other. "'Where is the man I married?' Abilé asks her husband Kossola, usually an unfailing optimist, who despairs at the American Colonization Society's silence:

"Bring him back, the one who smiles and laughs.

The one who loves the world." I pull her to me,

hug her hard. She smells of sunshine

and milk. She's what's real. "No more waiting,"

I promise her. "From this day forward

I will be here, now, with you."

(352)

Yet even once African Town is established, the triumphs of the new community coexist with the grief of losing home. An elder laments to a younger man who has suffered imprisonment and forced labor:

oh/ feïchitan/ de ground we walk on

here in america is hard as steel

i wish you could sink your feet

into de soft soil of africa

i am sorry i could not get you

back to de motherland.

(406)

Here, as in Augusta Savage, the poetry structures bold shifts in scale, allowing the story to cover full lifetimes through small and tender moments of reflection and connection. Latham and Waters use free verse to foreground the experiences and imagined inner lives of historical actors while also helping us keep straight a large cast with surprising ease. In African Town, the primary goal of the language is always fealty to the voices of this group of people, as they are carefully reimagined by the authors. Verse form, moreover, allows the authors to thread together highly disparate perspectives, including those of white slave captors and the ship Clotilda herself.

Clotilda's voice is conveyed through eleven mask poems, a form which consists of writing from the perspective of an object or a nonhuman being. The authors opted to write the ship's poems in unrhymed couplets because their stanzas look like waves on the page. It is essential for Clotilda to have a voice in this story. She is the vessel that captures the blood, sweat, tears, and bodily waste of the slaves. Within the dark confines of her hold, the ship is privy to communication by the enslaved characters which the captain and crew are not. The graceful and fast schooner is an unwilling accomplice in Meaher's illegal slave capture operation and begs forgiveness for the role she plays in it. Though the ship's captain and crew consider the enslaved Africans as living merchandise, Clotilda never forgets that her passengers are human beings. As a result, she feels compassion for the kidnapped Africans, is sympathetic to their ordeal, and forges an emotional attachment with them as demonstrated here:

Their screams threaten to tear me apart, but their long stretches of silence are even worse. I have the open sea to ride upon, but what must it be like

for them? I do what I can to make it a smooth crossing.

The captain and crew may not care about them, but I do.

(118)

Clotilda is dutiful in completing her assignment of transporting her passengers safe and sound to Alabama. But she does, however, express great disapproval of her task of transporting humans to be sold into slavery. In fact, there are moments where Clotilda secretly wishes for her captain and crew's cover to be blown on their illegal scheme. In the poem "Ten Feet from Glory", she says:

Oh, to be so close to collision, shipwreck, SOS! Had marine patrols arrived, the Africans would have been discovered and taken to land. Since the Bahamas outlawed slavery in 1834, Foster and the crew would be arrested, and the Africans freed. So close, I say. But not close enough.

(139)

Sadly, the ship meets a tragic end when Meaher orders her to be burned and sunk so as to not leave any clues linking back to him and his illegal slave trade trip. Her final poem, "Never Forgotten," reads:

After sixteen weeks of horror, the flames lick and roar.

Part of me welcomes the heat.

My oak and pine planks sputter, crackle.

By some miracle my hull sinks before it burns completely.

Part of me remains lodged in the channel—

A confession buried by water, waiting for someone to release me.

(164)

In 2019, the real Clotilda was released from her watery grave when her remains were discovered along Alabama's Mobile River. (A shipwreck found in 2018, thought to be the Clotilda, proved too large to be the missing ship.) Its discovery must have certainly brought some form of peace and closure to the descendants of the illegally traded enslaved Africans who traveled on her more than one hundred years ago. It would be impossible to discuss the Clotilda without discussing those individuals she transported back in 1860, for their spirits and physical traces live on in her forever and are embedded in her remains.

African Town's dissonant relation of the violence and voices of Middle Passage hearkens back to such groundbreaking works as Robert Hayden's 1962 poem "Runagate Runagate" and M. Nourbese Philip's 2008 book-length poem Zong! Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo (2018), an obvious and logical companion title, is based on interviews with Cudjo Lewis (birth name: Kossola Oluale), Clotilda's last known survivor, and the author's additional research. The narrative's voice was a point of contention between Hurston and publishers. They wanted to publish the text written in standard English dialect while Hurston argued that Lewis's dialect was a "vital and authenticating feature of the narrative." It is a rare opportunity to read about the life of an enslaved person in the form of a first-person account, hence why this book is so unique and valuable. Furthermore, the book may offer descendants of the Clotilda's enslaved Africans clues to help piece together the stories of their ancestors who were transported on the ship.

Whereas Augusta Savage and African Town bring archives to narrative life, our next honor book reckons with the more recent past: 2020. Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin's Ain't Burned All the Bright is a YA poem illustrated as an artist's book across three hundred glossy, color-saturated pages, which faithfully reproduce the lived-in texture of the artist's speckled, cream-colored, lined Moleskine notebook, as well as the patches of rough canvas that he has painted on and pasted in. There is almost a tactile sense here of the artist's mixed materials: pencil, magic marker, paint both brushed and sprayed or splattered, stamping—including fingerprints and page-on-page smudging, and cut out typed lines of Reynolds's poetry. Comprised of three "breaths"—each a long, tumbling sentence over a thick span of pages—Reynolds's poem is a meditation on the meaning of breath in the contemporary landscape of America: how the dread of the pandemic and racist violence coalesce and are communicated in the media and translated by the mind of the young person. Each section of the poem begins with a lined notebook page featuring "breath one," "breath two," "breath three"—and in each subsequent section the previous breath is shown fading away above the next breath into the background. Each of these three poetic breaths ends with the repeated refrain "in through the nose // out through the mouth" and a repeated visual representation of a black silhouetted hand holding a flower to a nose, followed by the same black silhouetted hand and lips blowing out a candle on top of a cupcake. The sweetly childlike images of flower and cupcake not only evoke bodily experience but also reclaim a gentle joy for the young speaker, even amid horrific headlines. Reynolds's poem makes use of anaphora in each section to create a hypnotic and "oceanic" sense of rhythm that mimics the breath. This work calls attention to the body and more specifically asks readers to pause and notice the rhythm of breath.

Like Nelson's Augusta Savage, Ain't Burned All the Bright highlights the lives of the artists and calls upon readers to consider the collaboration and distance between visual creator and poet. While Nelson's work traffics in the ekphrastic, where a poet's writing is inspired by and aimed at describing a work of art, Reynolds's poem and Griffin's artwork come together in a true spirit of collaboration. As Griffin notes in the author-and-illustrator dialogue printed in the back of the book, "without our past collaborations, you would have never known about how difficult it can be for me, as an artist, to make the text and image work without the art feeling like illustration, or feeling like the poem is about the art." Griffin's work in this book emphasizes imaginative responses to limitations and imaginative ways of making space. While the pages are dense with color and texture, there are also visual pauses, sections of lined paper left blank, as if readers might add their own words or images. The carefully limited palette of cream, black, scarlet, and sky blue, with occasional flashes of bright yellow, allows for images both stark and gentle. Hands, flowers, flames, masked faces, and domestic objects like chairs, set against backgrounds of smoke, water, and cloud-strewn skies, often border on the abstract: some pages are full of chairs or dancing arms, whereas others are fully geometric. The only fully represented face here is a black-penned portrait of George Floyd, vibrating with life. Griffin's restricted palette and iconography invite us to ask: What can a young person make, and change, with drastically limited resources?

Ain't Burned All the Bright asks, as do many books, what can change? But the change here, the locus of the dramatic action, is entirely internal. The narrator speaks from pandemic lockdown: a domestic, intimate, and claustrophobic family quarantine, marked by imagery of chairs, cabinet drawers, and windows. The narrator feels both tightly packed and distant from his loving but distracted family as mother watches TV, sister texts on her phone, brother plays a video game, and father struggles against the virus for breath in a nearby bedroom. Both the claustrophobia and the lure of screens are emphasized by Griffin's framing of the pages with a thick black border, rounded at the corners like an old-fashioned TV screen. Yet the entrapment, fear, and grief of 2020 also drive the poetry inward in a way that reveals the depths of a young person's interiority. The narrator dives into his inner life to search out reconnection with each family member and find some hope, joy, or simply space to breathe—what Reynolds metaphorically terms an "oxygen mask." The in medias res opening to the poem—"And I'm sitting here wondering why / my mother won't change the channel"—becomes an invitation for a young person to "change the channel" of their own life, of their own mind.

The first lines of the poem are also a reference to the ways in which the media played a crucial role in the understanding of the pandemic and racial violence. In a series of six spreads in the first section of the poem, the young speaker of the poem relates the experience of watching "the woman on the news saying // another woman has just been— - — -" and "now back to you, she says / and it goes back to the man saying // another man has been brutally - - - - — ." Each of these pages is then followed by a spread of blackness, as if the lined notebook pages have been methodically covered in vertical strips of black papier-mâché—erasing from the view of the readers something terrible. The next spread features an abstract artistic rendering of a small sailboat skimming a blue surface speckled with pinks and yellows while the sky is figured in scrapes of black, white, gray, and pink. The lines across the skyline read, "and then both of them are talking about // a kid my age." The next spread appears to zoom in on a scene in the water where black hands flail back and forth on the right page and the lines on the left page continue the narrative from the previous spread, "who couldn't breathe." This series of spreads in Ain't Burned All the Bright underscores the ways that the book uses space, color, and artistic style in order to draw attention to the poetic devices of caesura and anaphora—pause and repetition—that play out in the lines of the poem.

Reynolds and Griffin's imaginative response to quarantine entrapment resonates with another notable pandemic story from this year, Jacqueline Woodson's picture book The Year We Learned to Fly (illustrated by Rafael López), in which two quarantined siblings follow their grandmother's teachings to discover how to lift their minds off the ground, in keeping with the interior flights of their ancestors. Woodson and López's picture book for young readers and Reynolds and Griffin's YA collaboration are important reckonings with 2020, and specifically with Black young people's 2020 experiences.

Our most notable picture book and final honor book of this year, Michaela Goade's Berry Song, is a lavishly gorgeous account of foraging in Goade's Indigenous homeland on the southeast coast of Alaska and of practicing the Tlingit people's reciprocity with nature. Best known for her illustration of Carole Lindstrom's We Are Water Protectors (2020), Goade has created both the story and the artwork for Berry Song. As a young girl travels to an island with her grandmother to collect fruit and other gifts of the land, Goade's poetry winds through watercolors awash in corals and teals, misted by almost audible crashing waves, teeming with life from humpback whales to crows, and punctuated, of course, by glowing berries.

From the first spread of the picture book, readers are immersed in the natural world and situated geographically on the coast of Sitka, Alaska, in the largest US National Forest, Tongass National Forest. The book opens: "On an island at the edge of a wide, wild sea, / Grandma shows me how to live on the land." Throughout the picture book and in the author's note, Goade places emphasis on Indigenous food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the passing down of land knowledge from generation to generation. As she explains in her author's note, "As Tlingit people, our way of life has always been woven into the rhythm of the land and sea, to the animals and plants that nurture our body and spirit. … Berries hold great symbolic and spiritual significance. They connect us to land, community, and culture." This intergenerational and communal relationship is evident in the first scenes in which the young girl and her grandmother are depicted:

Together we pull

hemlock branches

from the salty ocean,

heavy with herring eggs

like tiny stars.

On the beach, we

gather ribbons of

slippery seaweed

dancing in the tide.

By the tumbling, icy falls,

we dip our nets for

silvery salmon hidden

beneath the current.

These lines appear on the second spread of the picture book and feature three scenes of the young protagonist and her grandmother gathering food from the water. Blending cool greens, blues, and whites, Goade's signature watercolor and mixed-media technique acts as a fitting frame for these stanzas that feature lush imagery and soft alliterative sounds. The subtle use of language play throughout the poem contributes to the resonance of the picture book's thematic focus on rhythm. In his 2006 essay on the rhetoric of rhythm in poetry, "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Edward Hirsch notes, "Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe." Hirsch goes on to say, "It is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. … It is poetry's way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic." In Berry Song, the repetition of soft h and s consonant and e and i vowel sounds in these lines ("hemlock," "heavy," "herring," "slippery seaweed," "silvery salmon") are juxtaposed with the trilling ring of the t sounds throughout ("together," "tiny," "tide," "tumbling"). These sounds mimic the rush and roil of the waves depicted in the illustration.

This is truly a song, which builds the ethic of reciprocal care into the poetic structure: "The berries sing to us, glowing like little jewels. / We sing too, so berry—and bear—know we are here" and "The ocean sings to us, / rolling ashore / like a beating drum. // We sing too, so the tides know we are home." The repetition of this call-and-response refrain where the natural world ("berries," "forest," "ancestors," "ocean") sings and the speaker of the poem uses the collective "we" to sing back carries throughout the poem and underscores Goade's reference to the "rhythm of the land and sea." The poetry unfolds for us the meeting of the spiritual and the practical, as the practice of honoring land and ancestors manifests in the labor of foraging and cooking. When the child narrator and her grandmother return home to share their bounty with the rest of their family, "Together we make salmonberry syrup and cranberry / marmalade until the kitchen glows like a summer sky."

Equally musical are the playful catalogs of berry names, great fun to speak aloud: "Thimbleberry, Swampberry, Bogberry, Chalkberry. / Lingonberry, Raspberry, Bunchberry, Cranberry." Readers can "forage" for these varieties in the book's pages with the help of the endpapers, in which intertwined berry branches form a bilingual illustrated glossary: berry names are provided in both English and Tlingit. Berry books are practically a picture book genre of their own, including such white man-authored classics as Robert McCloskey's Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Bruce Degan's Jamberry (1982). Berry books express playfulness and plenitude for a wide age range of readers: the youngest may "eat" berries off the pages and test out berry names, while older readers may be inspired to get outside and to listen to the natural world in new ways. Goade's work takes up this joyful genre to teach a Tlingit approach to nature that ultimately connects berry picking to both cultural preservation and environmental justice. As Goade notes in her afterword, "When I am lost in a patch of salmonberries that drip from the leaves in hues of sunshine, coral, and ruby, I am in awe of Mother Earth's many gifts, and I try my best to listen. … Together we can unite in defense of Mother Earth, becoming caretakers and ensuring a future for all." The author-illustrator encourages readers to talk to the berries, learn their Indigenous names, and ask them permission to be harvested. Through performing these practices, we acknowledge that the berries are living entities that possess a spirit; honor their role and significance within Tlingit culture; and understand that picking them is not a given right but rather a gift given to us from the land.

One spread strongly captures the essence of the lesson "We are part of the land as the land is a part of us." In this early spread figured in shades of green, the grandmother looks out from the upper left corner of the left page to her granddaughter who is positioned in the lower right-hand corner of the right page. They are each set against backdrops of vegetation with other greenery superimposed on their profiles. The girl's own hair is hardly seen as it is hidden by a sweeping mass of berry plants, ferns, and other vegetation. The bottom half of her body is made to vaguely look like a long flowing dress which is actually waves populated by wildlife and people rowing canoes. These two striking and stylized pages convey how humans are so interconnected with the land that at times it is difficult to delineate where we end and where nature begins.

In an illustration at the center of the picture book, Goade gives a nod to ecojustice concerns which the Tlingit face. In a tie to the activism portrayed in We Are Water Protectors, Berry Song features two protest signs among several small subtle images which frame a larger image of the grandmother's hands cupping the granddaughter's hands which themselves cup berries and sport berry-tinged fingers. One protest sign bears the slogan "Defend the Tongass." The Tongass National Forest is home to the traditional territory of the Tlingit, one of the first nations who have lived there for over ten thousand years. It is also the world's largest intact temperate rainforest. The other protest sign shows the slogan "Protect the Herring." Pacific herring is a keystone species in the marine ecosystems of the Tlingit nation. Various natural elements, such as kelp or hemlock branches, are used to harvest the fish's eggs, as the grandmother is shown doing in the book. Herring roe is a popular delicacy which is eaten fresh or cooked. Goade peppers the book with such real-life value and application, including information and inspiration for aspiring young foragers––even as Goade also appropriately advises readers only to gather those wild foods that they can experience with absolute certainty. And these pragmatic, nourishment-focused elements are inseparable from Goade's celebration of family ties, her honoring of the work of women and girls, and her invocation of environmental justice activism.

In the last few years, we have seen a veritable flood of YA and middle-grade narratives in verse for young readers. This genre has become essential to the field—and in particular, essential to the ways in which underrepresented voices and stories are shared with young readers. We find that two questions help us draw out strong contributions to children's works in verse: First, is it really poetry, rather than prose arbitrarily chopped up to fill the terms of a book contract or an editor's suggestion? Second, why is it poetry––why did this story require a verse form?

In Nelson's Augusta Savage, poetry structures an examination of what it means to make art—whether from words or from bronze. While any poetic work could potentially inspire young readers' own artistic endeavors, Nelson's verses set the standard for taking young people seriously as creative and philosophical interlocutors. Both Augusta Savage and African Town showcase the usefulness of verse for biography and historical storytelling. Poetry helps carry narrative through vivid vignettes, small moments that allude to broader currents of experience, rather than the thorough coverage of time in conventional biographical prose tomes. In African Town, moreover, Latham and Waters use verse to distill the distinct voices and experiences of a wide range of characters—some deeply sympathetic and others entirely not—and to gently connect these wide-ranging perspectives into a narrative both coherent and heterogeneous.

Whereas Augusta Savage and African Town traverse time and space and take in worlds, Ain't Burned All the Bright uses poetry to unfold a tiny, constrained moment into a full dramatic arc of interior conflict, resolution, transformation. This work is an honoring of a young Black person's vast interiority, imagination, and care. Additionally, Reynolds's poetry creates the opportunity for true collaboration and mutual influence with visual artist Griffin. Poetry opens the expressive space that Griffin's art then shapes. Berry Song is music. Within Goade's verse, we hear the rituals of an intergenerational heritage, the rhythmic incantations of nature across the seasons, and the poetry of the berries themselves. The lyrical lines sing in sync with the dynamic currents of Goade's visual art, carrying us in time like the pulsing of waves. The poetry matters because the way one speaks to the earth matters. The care-filled, crafted language also calls our attention to the central presence of the Tlingit language in this story, even when most of the words are in English. The four works we recognize this year, then, not only exemplify fine verse but constitute a mandate for it. Now, more than ever—as we and our young people confront history, explore long-buried stories, process the pandemic, and reckon with our care of the earth—we turn to poetry.

Notes

1. This year the judges read and discussed eighty works of poetry published for young readers.

References

Dickinson, Emily. "I dwell in Possibility." The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Back Bay Books, 1960, p. 327.

Goade, Michaela. Berry Song. Little, Brown, 2022.

Hirsch, Edward. "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." Poetry Foundation, 23 Jan. 2006, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68424/out-of-the-cradle-endlesslyrocking. Accessed 25 May 2023.

Latham, Irene, and Charles Waters. African Town. G. P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2022.

Marshall, Kerry James. Untitled (Studio). 2014. MET, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/669451. Accessed 30 May 2023.

Nelson, Marilyn. Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor's Life. Little, Brown, 2022.

Reynolds, Jason. Ain't Burned All the Bright. Illustrated by Jason Griffin, Atheneum, 2022.

Zapruder, Matthew. Introduction. The Best American Poetry 2022, edited by David Lehman, Scribner Poetry, 2022, pp. xxi–xxvii.