By John Grandits
Concrete poems where the words make the shape, a roller coaster that loops down the page, a burp spelled out huge, told by a wisecracking eleven-year-old named Robert.
These poems don't just sit in lines, they draw themselves. A poem about a roller coaster climbs and plunges and loops around the page so your eyes ride it. A poem about the perfect burp is printed BLBLBLBURP in giant letters. There's the world's longest sentence, a diagram of exactly why Robert's sister is so annoying, a skateboard trick you read by turning the book. Robert is eleven and sarcastic and completely convinced none of it is his fault, and John Grandits shapes every poem out of the words themselves, so the page is a puzzle and a joke at once. A child who thinks they hate poetry will spend twenty minutes just figuring out how to read each one.
Your child loves comics and doodles and thinks poems are just words on lines, and this is the shelf's answer. Here the shape IS the poem, so reading it feels like solving something, and the visual-diary flavor lands squarely with the Wimpy Kid crowd. Robert's fed-up eleven-year-old voice is exactly the age of your child, complaining about his sister and his chores in a way that feels like a friend talking. It stretches the definition of poetry in the best way, showing your child that a poem can be a drawing, a joke, and a shape all at once, and that they could absolutely make one.