Illustrated by Masha D'yans
Adapted by Melanie Maria Goodreaux
Edited by Teachers & Writers Collaborative
Foreward by Walter Dean Myers
$19.95, ages 5 and up, 38 pages
Winged pencils fly through a canyon of skyscrapers in New York City, as a poem rises from the streets and takes off through the pages of a picture book.
The poem, both written on the pages and personified there in art, is an exhilarating read and the result of an innovative series of writing workshops in the city's public schools.
In 2008, a group of teachers and writers asked students ages 6-18 years old to stretch their imaginations and share deep down what they see and feel when they look around their city.
The idea was to celebrate New York and as poet Walter Dean Myers writes in a foreword, inspire a "cultural reweaving of the familiar." Stale ideas of the city were to be discarded and glorious new ones, ushered in.
Then all of the poems were gathered together and poet Melanie Maria Goodreaux, who heads the project for the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, pieced words, feelings and ideas from each of them into one big poem.
"The children of New York City gave me stacks of poems on hundreds of loose leaf pages to craft this unprecedented work," Goodreaux writes in an editor's note. "They scribbled lines about how big they imagined this poem to be and wrote about their love for the city in wobbling kid-created cursive…"
The result was a melding of perspectives, descriptions, alliterative verse and sound words into a poem that feels almost as big and bold and diverse as the city itself -- a poem that when read aloud feels like it has the energy of a chorus behind it.
