Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire
Questions for Miriam by Warsan Shire
Were you ever lonely?
Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same as a warm body, a soft mouth? Did you know how to say no to young men who cried outside your hotel rooms? Did you listen to the songs they wrote, tongues wet with praise for you?
What sweaty bars did you begin in? Did you see them holding bottles by the neck, hair on their arms rising as your notes hovered above their heads? Did you know of the girls who sang into their fists mimicking your brilliance?
Did they know that you were only human?
My parents played your music at their wedding. Called you Makeba, never Miriam, never first name, always singer. Never wife, daughter, mother, never lover, aching.
Did you tell people that songs weren’t the same as a warm body or a soft mouth? Miriam, I’ve heard people using your songs as a prayer, begging god in falsetto. You were a city
The Littlest Yak by Lu Fraser (Author) and Kate Hindley (Illustrator)
***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***
Gertie is a little yak with a big heart. Eager to be big and tall like the other yaks in her herd, Gertie tries her hardest to make herself bigger and stronger but finds her negative self-perception tested when an emergency calls for someone smaller like her.
In the end, Gertie learns that it’s not the size of your horns that matter but the strength of your character, and that everyone in the herd has something amazing to offer regardless of their size or ability. Reminiscent of the story of Rudolph with his blinking red nose or Kyo Maclear’s picture book Spork, The Littlest Yak shows readers of all ages that sometimes the things we don’t like about ourselves end up becoming our greatest assets. Five stars and two thumbs way up for Gertie, who now holds a coveted spot as one of my favorite heroines in all of children’s literature.
Five stars and two thumbs way up for Gertie, who now holds a coveted spot as one of my favorite heroines in all of children’s literature.
The Littlest Yak is due to be released in the U.S. on October 1st, 2021 and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism by Alice Walker
We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful – because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed – is made much more bearable when it is shared, face-to-face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.
Someone was saying Something about shadows covering the field, about how things pass, how one sleeps toward morning and the morning goes.
Someone was saying how the wind dies down but comes back, how shells are the coffins of wind but the weather continues.
It was a long night and someone said something about the moon shedding its white on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead but more of the same.
Someone mentioned a city she had been in before the war, a room with two candles against a wall, someone dancing, someone watching. We began to believe
the night would not end. Someone was saying the music was over and no one had noticed. Then someone said something about the planets, about the stars, how small they were, how far away.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
People in the book world are always giving Rupi Kaur a hard time. They say her poetry isn’t actually poetry. It’s too sanitized. It’s too accessible. Well pardon the f&$! out of me, but I don’t think you should need an MFA to be able to access poetry. Maybe it’s jealousy? Maybe they’re pissed that Ms. Kaur is out here stacking up paper while twelve people in the entire world are telling them they’re the next Emerson? I don’t know and I don’t really care. If something someone reads resonates with them and makes them feel something, then damn the literati and their thinly-veiled colonialism. Mazel tov.
Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.
Nevertheless, do not allow yourself to be carried away by how you shoot in the morning, whether well or badly. There are many more days ahead, and each arrow is a life in itself. Use your bad moments to discover what makes you tremble. Use your good moments to find your road to inner peace. But do not stop either out of fear or out of joy: the way of the bow has no end.
The Voracious Bibliophile 