Take Off Your Brave: The World Through the Eyes of a Preschool Poet

In an introduction, educator Yasmine Shamma details the volume’s beginnings: while inviting her son, then-four-year-old Nadim, to write a poem about coming home from school, she asked him to list the things he removes inside the front door: “You take off your brave,” he told her, in a moment of insight that “shared his experiences of the world.” These pages collect poems that Nadim dictated to his mother, poems by Nadim’s sister, and some by his preschool classmates, too, on topics conceptual, experiential, and social-emotional. All feel fresh, spontaneous, and aware of important truths: “Nothing can make love disappear/ Not spells/ Not magic/ Not mermaids/ Not anything.” With a loose line and sparky excitement, Ismail captures children of various abilities and skin tones in uninhibited play—dancing, pushing a puppy in a perambulator, presenting a huge bunch of flowers to a mother. Nadim notes, “Anyone can write a poem if they just put on a paper what they think,” and the volume invites children to write their own, as they are. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)