Should You Be a River: A Poem About Love

Gr 4 Up—Unconditional love is filled with ups and downs, trials and tribulations. In this personal poem, Young explores how love impacts our lives. Using elements of nature, he takes readers through water, earth, fire, and wind in relation to love. Each line of text flows naturally into the content of the next page. The images are stunning, with a mix of photography, cut paper, and calligraphy. Vibrant colors of earth tones will appeal to readers' eyes. Some of the pages unfold in unique ways to support the narrative. For example, "Should you be a waterfall, I'll scream when you plunge" has a page that unfolds vertically to give the effect of plunging down the falls. The illustrations also offer various perspectives; the art for "I'll dream you a vision of towering trees" is cut paper rising toward photographs of tree tops to give the effect of tree trunks stretching to the sky. The author's note is an important piece of this book because it tells the backstory of the poem's creation. It reveals how conversation, writing, art, and collaboration can be a healing process when faced with loss. This title would be an interesting pairing with books about healing, love, or comfort such as Georgia Heard's This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort (Candlewick, 2002) or Joyce Sidman's What the Heart Knows (Houghton Harcourt, 2013).—Andy Plemmons, David C. Barrow Elementary, Athens, GA