My mind / is always / open. / I don’t think / there’s even / a door.” Naomi Shihab Nye’s original poetry and anthologies published for children and teens always offer a fresh, original, affirming view of life and the world in which we live. In A Maze Me , Nye also acknowledges a deep-seated desire: to be singular but not alone, an idea that is both comfort and contradiction. For many girls on the brink or in the midst of adolescence, it may seem an impossibility to achieve, perhaps even too scary to contemplate. This volume can serve as poems of encouragement to girls for cultivating their own way of being in the world, and as poems of discovery for seeing how many truths they share with others. Nye writes in her introduction that people always ask: “What do you want to be? . . . They don’t ask who or how you want to be. . . I wanted to be curious, interested, interesting, hopeful—and a little bit odd was okay too. . . If you have a voice and aren’t afraid to spend it . . . if you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside . . . you’ll be okay.” The 72 original, accessible poems she presents here are on a wide range of topics, from a first crush to babysitting, to the sadness of leaving childhood behind. There are many moments of revelation, connection, and contemplation prompted by observations of the everyday and the extraordinary, whether it’s a pink ribbon found on a hiking trail or waiting expectantly in the hopes that a meteor will blaze across the sky. “We want the stars to surprise us / We want to be / amazed.” (Ages 11–15)

Life is a tangle of
twisting paths.
Some short.
Some long.
There are dead ends.
And there are choices.
And wrong turns,
and detours,
and yield signs,
and instruction booklets,
and star maps,
and happiness,
and loneliness.
And friends.
And sisters.
And love.
And poetry.

Life is a maze.
You are a maze.
Amazed.
And amazing.