By Eloise Greenfield
Sixteen poems in the voice of one Black girl listing the things she loves, and it is the warmest small book of poetry there is.
Sixteen poems. That's the whole book, and every one is spoken by the same girl, telling you what she loves. She loves the way her cousin talks. She loves riding on a train. She loves the music so much she has to get up and move. In 'Rope Rhyme' she's jumping double dutch and the poem itself starts skipping. In 'Harriet Tubman' she tells you flat out that Harriet Tubman didn't take no stuff. The title poem runs through everything she loves and lands on the one thing she doesn't, which is being made to go to sleep. Leo and Diane Dillon drew soft pencil portraits all through it, so it reads like someone's family album with the poems written underneath.
This is the book that shows a class poetry doesn't have to be a joke to be enjoyable. Everywhere else on this shelf the payoff is a laugh; here the payoff is recognition, and a child who has never once seen the point of a poem gets it in about ninety seconds because the poem is just a girl saying what she likes. It's short, sixteen poems in forty-eight pages, so you can read the whole thing in one sitting or pull one out in three minutes. Greenfield writes in a plain, spoken, Black American voice that has real rhythm running under it, which makes it a gift to read aloud and an even better one to hand to a child to read aloud themselves. And it is one of the few classic poetry books where a Black child is simply the person the poems belong to, not the subject of a lesson.