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

PreS-Gr 3–A series of poems dictated by a four-year-old boy to his mother, and supplemented with poems written by his younger sister and by his preschool class, provide insight into a child’s budding artistic voice and elucidates broad themes of the everyday human experience. The clear, expressive free-form pieces examine the cornerstones of a young person’s world: home, school, family, friends, sensations, memories, and emotions. Many of the verses reveal that certain linguistic and rhetorical devices typically viewed as intentional components of a poet’s craft are, in fact, instinctive elements of human play originating in the landscape of imagination. Nadim employs onomatopoeia (a train ride “Feels like bumpity-bump/ Sounds like chuka chuka shhhh”), repetition (“It’s my mom, it’s my mom”), personification (“Wednesday wears a shirt with glitter on it”), and concrete symbolism (a mix of nervousness and excitement is dubbed “Scared-sugar”), all with a natural and authentic ease. In mixed-media illustrations replete with soft washes of desaturated color, Ismail locates introspective moments in the text and amplifies them, using them as jumping-off points for scenes depicting archetypal imagery of youth: exuberant dancing and pretend play, exploration in nature, a skinned knee, the peak of a jump-rope jump, hiding in a cardboard box. The treatment of these scenes—busy, but uncluttered; energetic, but never distracting—evokes both the wildness and calm of childhood.