Enormous Smallness:A Story of E. E. Cummings

Gr 3 Up—This enchanting picture book biography introduces children to the life and work of e.e. cummings, one of America's most innovative poets. With a tree house in the city and a cabin by the woods in the country each summer, cummings grew up surrounded by family and nature, and his imagination soared. He began writing poetry from the age of three, which his mother recorded. Written in verse, the text is accessible and lends itself well to read-alouds. The book itself is a work of art, full of thick pages of whimsical, full-spread illustrations in a palette of grays, blues, browns, and greens. Burgess chronicles the poet's childhood and early adulthood, beginning and ending in the Greenwich Village studio where he would spend nearly 40 years of his life. Several child-friendly poems, including "who are you, little i" and "in Just-," are interwoven into the text (and appended). Pair with Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet's Caldecott Honor title A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams (Eerdmans, 2008) for a unit on poetry.