Author and Illustrator John Grandits
Publisher: Clarion Books
Copyright 2007
42 pages
Concrete Poetry/ Children’s Poetry
I chose to read Blue Lipstick because of the very interesting title. The thought of reading concrete poems was not very appealing to me; however, after reading Blue Lipstick, I was surprised at how fun it could be. Blue Lipstick is about an adolescent girl and the many struggles that she faces from her brother, to her parents, to playing on the volleyball team, to what she will do to impress the boy she likes, all written in concrete poems. This book is funny yet blatantly truthful about how young girls feel as they are growing into young women.
The illustrations in Blue Lipstick are the poems since most all of the poems are concrete poems. The medium that was used was a Macintosh G4. The illustrator chose to use a simple color palette of white, black, and blue. The illustrator also uses a great deal of negative space and very informal text placement. The negative space that the illustrator incorporated into Blue Lipstick highlights the poems and gives the reader a clear direction in which to start reading the odd shaped poems.
This book would be appropriate for older children and young adolescents. Teachers of younger children could use this book as a great example of what concrete poems look like; however, younger children would not understand all the poems and what some of the poems say. It would be better for most teachers in elementary grades to simply chose a few poems from this book to share with their class about what concrete poems are and how they look. This book is not very appropriate for younger children; however, I truly enjoyed reading the amusing poems.
No comments:
Post a Comment