“I like to think of poems as word paintings. A poet uses words like colors to paint pictures inside your head. In concrete poems, or shape poems, the words also paint pictures on the page.” A concise definition of concrete poetry introduces a collection of 21 elegantly simple, clever concrete poems. Even the poem’s single-word titles are playfully apt in their arrangement of individual letters, while the poems themselves offer further visual delight in describing the concept or object of the title. If the first 20 poems don’t also inspire young readers to try writing poems of their own, the final poem, “PoeTRY,” is a direct invitation, and appears on the page as an inverted pyramid: “poetry is about taking away the words you don’t need / poetry is taking way words you don’t need / poetry is words you need / poetry is words / try.” (Age 8 and older)

Who says words need to be concrete? This collection shapes poems in surprising and delightful ways.

Concrete poetry is a perennially popular poetic form because they are fun to look at. But by using the arrangement of the words on the page to convey the meaning of the poem, concrete or shape poems are also easy to write! From the author of the incredibly inventive Lemonade: And Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word comes another clever collection that shows kids how to look at words and poetry in a whole new way.