I didn’t discover Nikki Giovanni until I was in high school but this collection made me wish that I had found her when I was a much younger child. Despite this book not resonating emotionally with me as much as some of the more recent poetry I’ve read, I still found myself impressed by Giovanni’s artistry in it, which was especially apparent in the way she turned mundane seeming experiences and thoughts into venerated memory.

This book felt like an invitation to Black children to consider their world, their thoughts, their rhythm, and their very way of being is worth writing and celebrating – a message that feels even more relevant now than when it was originally written. With that in mind, I’d recommend this collection most strongly to Black children, especially the child artists, poets, creatives, and the ones who want to be creatives but aren’t sure they have something to say. May Giovanni’s commitment to her Blackness, her voice, her community, and her right to put her art into the world and challenge the status quo serve as a light to guide Black youth artists toward the same revolutionary commitment that propelled her for so long.

Despite being created before COVID altered the educational landscape and being unnecessarily repetitive at times, this literature review offers a solid foundation of research educators can use to choose evidence-based strategies to improve academic outcomes. As a school counselor, I found this report most helpful when read through the lens of Hatching Results for Secondary School Counseling: Implementing Core Curriculum, Individual Student Planning, and Other Tier One Activities, particularly Hatch et al.’s section on using a Non-Cognitive Needs Survey to assist in planning core curriculum. That framing allowed me to finish this review with clearer ideas about how to implement a counseling curriculum that better supports the academic development of students and how to help teachers think more accurately about the strategies they use to support students in their classrooms. While I wish the authors had provided more explicit strategies for putting the research into practice and helping colleagues do the same, I still believe this report serves as a good start for educators seeking more research-backed approaches to improving student success.

A solid mix of poetry with several standout poems, this chapbook feels in many ways like a love letter to the poetry made in and shaped by Philly and the surrounding areas. While it didn’t provide the consistent emotional resonance I’ve gotten from some of my favorite anthologies, it did fill me with a deep sense of gratitude for poetry, for poets, and for the Free Library of Philadelphia’s acknowledgement that we would be lost without the poets in our midst.