This volume demonstrates how the social and instructional worlds that children inhabit influence their poetry writing and performances. Drawing on rich vignettes of students from different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, it describes and analyzes the work of eight to ten-year-old U.S. students involved in a month-long poetry unit. Children Writing Poems outlines the value of a ‘poetic-functional’ approach to help children convey a poem’s meaning and mood, and expresses the need for educators to scaffold children’s oral readings and performances over time.

This collection is so damn good I want to quote from every exploration inside every poem: food, family, love, tragedy, humor, religion and death, Certo''s O Body of Bliss possesses an incisive immediacy, replete with surprises, that grabs and won''t let go: "Who wasn''t shoved in a room by Boy Who Would Grow Up/To Be Rapist, his hands at work while her friends picked the lock?" Storyteller and lyric poet all in one, in "Ode to the Airbnb," she asks: "isn''t it/ sacred to be someone else, stepping over/ the threshold into their skin, into the history/ of closets, into the wall spaces between framed/ photos bound in their hall light, their wanderings/ and absences, their quilts and smells, the lives/ of the hearth and the lock on the storage room." The range of her conjuring coupled with her linguistic gifts leave me awestruck.

  - Roger Weingarten

This volume demonstrates how the social and instructional worlds that children inhabit influence their poetry writing and performances. Drawing on rich vignettes of students from different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, it describes and analyzes the work of eight to ten-year-old U.S. students involved in a month-long poetry unit. Children Writing Poems outlines the value of a ‘poetic-functional’ approach to help children convey a poem’s meaning and mood, and expresses the need for educators to scaffold children’s oral readings and performances over time.

This collection is so damn good I want to quote from every exploration inside every poem: food, family, love, tragedy, humor, religion and death, Certo''s O Body of Bliss possesses an incisive immediacy, replete with surprises, that grabs and won''t let go: "Who wasn''t shoved in a room by Boy Who Would Grow Up/To Be Rapist, his hands at work while her friends picked the lock?" Storyteller and lyric poet all in one, in "Ode to the Airbnb," she asks: "isn''t it/ sacred to be someone else, stepping over/ the threshold into their skin, into the history/ of closets, into the wall spaces between framed/ photos bound in their hall light, their wanderings/ and absences, their quilts and smells, the lives/ of the hearth and the lock on the storage room." The range of her conjuring coupled with her linguistic gifts leave me awestruck.

  - Roger Weingarten