Exploring the Vulnerable Heart of Verse Novels with Children

By Ted Kesler

I have just completed my position as chairperson of the NCTE Poetry and Verse Novels for Children Committee. Our list of notable poetry and verse novels that were published in 2021 as well as other information about the award can be found on the NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children page.

In the post Exploring Notable Poetry Books for Advocacy with Children published on 3/15/2022, I presented three notable poetry piturebooks from this list that promote advocacy and offered lesson plan ideas to do with children. In this second post, I discuss three notable verse novels that promote resourcefulness and the strength of family bonds in the face of overwhelming adversity. All three verse novels featured– Samira Surfs (Ruhksanna Guidroz), The Lost Language (Claudia Mills), and Red, White, and Whole (Rajani LaRocca) – feature 12 year-old girl protagonists. Therefore, I recommend these books for grades 5 through 7 readers. 

​First, it is important to establish what constitutes notable verse novels for children. Our committee’s definition is:

• A narrative told predominantly in poetic forms, with strong poetic elements.
• The poetry forms and elements are integral to the telling of the story.
• Excellence in writing and emotional impact. We ask: does the poetry "create images, express feelings, and stir emotions" (Cullinan, Liang, and Galda, 2016)?
  

We look for purposeful and aesthetic uses of such poetic elements as metaphor and other figurative language, pattern, imagery, and evocative word choice. Verse novels often use free verse, but might also include other poetic forms, such as rhyming couplets, enjambment, concrete poems, personification, and rhythms that represent the voice of strong characters. 

The verse novels I present in this blog post certainly meet these criteria to heighten each protagonist’s encounter with adversity. An example is from Samira Surfs. Samira, her older brother, Khaled, and their parents are now living as unwanted refugees in Bangladesh, after escaping religious persecution in Burma (now called Myanmar). 

“Escape”

I covered my ears from the pa-pa-pa
and the screaming.
Who did they shoot?
I’m too scared to open my eyes.
Soldiers torched homes
our mosques
our market.
Smoke curled around our throats,
squeezing.


So we fled with neighbors
into the blackness of night,
terror biting down hard.
I glanced behind
to see if it was all true.
“Samira, keep your eyes ahead,” Baba called out. 

This excerpt expresses the power of poetry to convey this harrowing experience. Guidroz uses onomatopoeia, personification, strong imagery and word choice, metaphor, line breaks and stanzas to "create images, express feelings, and stir emotions.” 

​This book invites so many analytic and creative responses that will heighten students’ intentions for social justice. Here are some suggestions:
​

1. The teacher might photocopy each poem across the novel that describe the family’s escape from Burma. Reading across these poems, students then might bullet information they learned about Samira’s family’s life in Burma. This would create lively discussion. The teacher might then photocopy the first excerpt of the Author’s Note that explains this refugee crisis (page 404 to top of page 405). Students might then revise and elaborate their thinking.
2. The teacher might photocopy some poems that describe conditions that Samira and her family face as unwanted refugees in Bangladesh and do similar comparative work with the excerpt of the Author’s Note that describes these conditions (middle of page 405 to middle of page 406).
3. Similarly, the teacher might photocopy poems that describe Khaled, Samir and her friends learning to surf. Students might synthesize what they learned about surfing across these poems. They then might research the real-life empowerment of girls who learned to surf at Cox’s Bazar (the setting of this novel) using an online site such as The Surfer Girls of Cox’s Bazar. 
   

​In The Lost Language, Bumble and her best friend Lizard, in an effort to gain the attention and respect of Bumble’s mom – a linguistics professor who studies vanishing languages – try to “save” a vanishing language. Teachers might share Know & Think Tube's video Linguistic Diversity, which provides an overview of linguistic diversity and why it matters. Students might then visit the Endangered Languages Project website that Mills provides in the “Author’s Note” to investigate and report on a vanishing language. The language they study could perhaps be from a country where their families come from or from here in the United States. Students can share information about the language and present reasons why it is vanishing. Finally, the class might watch Karen Leung's  TEDx video Embracing Multilingualism and Eradicating Linguistic Bias in which she talks about linguistic diversity and language biases. Students can discuss ideas for practicing linguistic accommodation and acceptance. 

​​​In Red, White, and Whole, Reha contends with being the only Hindu girl with brown skin, dark eyes, and black hair, from India in her private middle school in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid-1980s. As teachers read-aloud this book, students might keep a “Parking Lot” of new learning about Indian culture, as so many poems are rich with descriptions of their foods and dress and celebrations. These notes would support rich discussion. Students then might use some of these poems as mentor texts to write their own poem that is steeped in one of their own cultural practices for a class book celebrating diversity. 

All three verse novels also contend with issues of trauma. I pointed out the issues in Samira Surfs. In The Lost Language (spoiler alert), Bumble and her father contend with her mother’s mental breakdown. In Red, White, and Whole (spoiler alert), Reha and her father contend with her mother’s leukemia. Here is one excerpt:

Under hospital lights,
a bag of fluid drip drip drips
through a plastic tube into Amma’s arm.
One evening when Daddy and I visit,
a nurse comes in behind us,
and what she hangs on the metal pole near the bed
is not a bag of fluid,
but a bag of blood.
I see it and
the world turns gray
with specks of light floating in the corners.
Reha! Amma cries.
The next thing I know,
I am lying on the floor of Amma’s hospital room
Daddy holding an ice pack to my neck,
the nurse bending my legs.
Are you all right, kanna? Amma asks.
Even though
she’s the one who’s sick.


Under hospital lights,
the world is upside down.
The world of medicine,
the one I’ve always wanted to join,
is scary.
And I begin to question
whether I really want to be a part of it.

Here I turn to The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy (Dutro, 2019) for guidance. After reading this and other poems in the novel that focus on Amma’s illness, teachers might open invitations for students to share and write their own entries of times that they faced fear of illness or injury or hospitalization for themselves or loved ones that would open the vulnerable heart of literacy in the class community. These kinds of invitations are also possible for poems that describe the traumatic situations in Samira Surfs and The Lost Language. By making our classrooms sites of testimony and critical witness, we create “literacies of connection, of love, and of respect for the knowledge that comes from pain, from struggle, and toward the power of bringing that knowledge to learning” (p. 113).

Ted Kesler, Ed.D. is an Associate Professor at Queens College, CUNY and has been a CLA Member since 2010. He served as chairperson of the NCTE Poetry and Verse Novels for Children Committee from 2019 to 2021.
www.tedsclassroom.com | @tedsclassroom | www.facebook.com/tedsclassroom) ​