BOOKSPEAK! by Laura Purdie Salas

http://www.syndetics.com/index.aspx?isbn=9780547223001/mc.gif&client=bipsite&type=nocover

Salas, Laura Purdie. 2011. BookSpeak!: Poems About Books. Ill. by Josee Bisaillon. New York: Clarion Books. ISBN 9780547223001

In the humorous collection BookSpeak!, Laura Purdie Salas has created playful poems that books themselves would have penned if books could write. This illustrated children’s poetry book is delightfully unique in its point of view as each individual poem gives the spotlight to a specific part of a book—index, cover, bookplate, middle, end, plot, pictures—as if they’ve been given the stage to finally speak.

This personification of books is at once charming and mesmerizing, compelling the reader to get lost inside the psyche of a book. The poems offer a good variety of styles including free verse, rhyming couplets, and acrostic. The general layout, styling, and lettering of the collection is playfully attractive for children. The decorative collage art by Josee Bisaillon accompanying each poem adds visual whimsy to the amusing rhythmic verses. School Library Journal agrees, ”Bisaillon skillfully incorporates the printed poems into the artwork so that the words and images have a single, unified, visual effect.”  In the poem titled “Conflicted”, the confession of a conflict has a real endearing quality: “I’m trouble, I’m misery, problems unplanned./ I’m an earthquake, an illness, a ransom demand./ My characters hate me. They don’t think I’m grand./ But without me their plots would be dreary and bland.”

BookSpeak! received the 2012 CYBIL for poetry as well as a Beehive Children’s Poetry Book Award in 2013.

This collection can be paired with poems about libraries to promote National Library Week. Similar themed books include Please Bury Me In the Library by J. Patrick Lewis or Judy Sierra’s Wild About Books. 

Books in Print. TWU Library. Accessed October 7, 2013 http://ezproxy.twu.edu:2125