If you loved 'One Last Word,' you will be over the moon for this new poetry/art anthology from Nikki Grimes. Each Harlem Renaissance poem is paired with a Nikki Grimes poem written in the golden shovel style she does so well and accompanied by an original work of art that complements the two poems. In the last half of the book, short bios on the poets and artists are included. Reading these beautiful is like balm for the soul and the artwork fires up the imagination. My favorite poem is entitled...

This rating/review is based an advanced copy from Netgalley and Bloomsbury Children's Books.This book is absolutely tremendous! I read Nikki Grimes' One Last Word a few years ago and I was really impressed by the poetic form, but it felt a bit uneven. This collection uses that same poetic form and completely blew me away. Every single poem is so strong and the source material Grimes is working from is incredible. I am absolutely going to look up every single one of these poets and read more of t...

This children’s book introduces young readers to lesser known Harlem Renaissance poets. The focus is on women poets of that time who have not received recognition as their male contemporaries. The selections of poems are excellent in their use of imagery, rhythm and other poetic devices. Nikki Grimes displays her creativity by using the Golden Shovel method to create a poem from a line in the Harlem Renaissance era. It is a way from Grimes and young readers to have a conversation with poets of t...

Gorgeously illustrated, it's most successful as a curated collection of Harlem Renaissance women poets; the author's 'remixes' are pretty hit or miss.

Reviewing for SLC--more on this excellent poetry book later

This book is a treasure and introduces readers to the many outstanding women of the Harlem Renaissance. Nikki Grimes combines poetry from the Harlem Renaissance with her own poetry to create a story of a girl discovering forgotten African American women poets . What makes this collection unique is that Grimes uses the Golden Shovel method to create her own poems while also introducing other forms of poetry. The Golden Shovel method is where you take a short poem in its entirety, or a line or wor...

I really liked this collection of poems. I thought they were very cleverly drawn from poems by women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The poems are about womanhood, blackness and the intersection of both identities. This book would work for both middle-grade and adult audiences. If you enjoy real poetry, I would highly recommend.Thanks to Bloomsbury for an eARC of this book (my first Nikki Grimes's) via Netgalley!

If you loved 'One Last Word,' you will be over the moon for this new poetry/art anthology from Nikki Grimes. Each Harlem Renaissance poem is paired with a Nikki Grimes poem written in the golden shovel style she does so well and accompanied by an original work of art that complements the two poems. In the last half of the book, short bios on the poets and artists are included. Reading these beautiful is like balm for the soul and the artwork fires up the imagination. My favorite poem is entitled...

E ARC provided by NetgalleyI'm super picky about poetry; really, the only modern poet I really like is Timothy Steele, who uses formulaic verse brilliantly. Naomi Shahib Nye is another one whose work I like (Amaze Me was fantastic), and I'm going to have to add Grimes' Legacy to this list.This is an interesting concept in poetry. Not only does Grimes collect poems from women writers who flourished during the Harlem Renaissance, she then takes the poems and writes her own in the "Golden Shovel" f...

A number of things came together in creating this volume of poems. First, there were a number of relatively unknown women poets writing during the Harlem Renaissance, that period beginning in 1918 through the min-1930s when African American arts flourished. Second, there is the relatively new poetic form devised by poet Terrance Hayne called the Golden Shovel. Third, there is the incomparable poet Nikki Grimes. Put together, the result is Legacy, a collection of poems by African American women p...

This book is a treasure. Usually I buy books and pass them on to a teacher friend. She's not getting this one. I need to read again, to sink into these poems, into the lives of these forgotten poets. And into Grimes's Golden Shovel poems.Oh, and the original art!! The beautiful art.Forgotten female poets of the Harlem Renaissance...women with towering talent, who shined for a while, and then seemed to slide back into a more mundane world. They left the high-powered world of artists and became te...

This review and many more can be found on my blog: Feed Your Fiction AddictionIn this poetry collection, Nikki Grimes celebrates many of the unsung Black women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Grimes shares one poem from each author and then uses that work as the creative springboard for her own verse via the poetic form of the Golden Shovel. In this form, the poet (in this case Grimes) takes a phrase from the original poem and uses each word from that phrase as the final word of a line in a new...

When you think about the Harlem Renaissance, how many women can you name? Most people would name Lorraine Hansberry (playwright of "A Raisin in the Sun"). This collection edited by poet Nikki Grimes is a praise to the women who contributed to this essential movement one hundred years ago. Alternating between Grimes' poetry (and the illustrations) and poems by other modern female poets, are poems by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Esther Popel (read "Flag Salute"), Angelina Weld Grimke (a relative of the fa...

The "rules" of Golden Shovel: grab a striking line from a poem, or for short poems, take it in its entirety. Bold that striking line or poem.Arrange that striking line or poem in a line, word by word, in the right marginYou then create. your new poem, keeping the borrowed line or poem as the last words of each lineThe result is a lovely call and response from the ancestors to Ms. Grimes and back again. What a fabulous homage to these, until now, forgotten names that sit equal to Langston Hughes,...

A poetic gem. I would give this to anyone who has an interest in poetry. Loved the formatting, the history, and the art!

This young reader book is about the little known women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The author uses The Golden Shovel method to create her poems based on the poems of these women. I love that each poem has an illustration from female African American illustrators.

First sentence from the preface: For centuries, accomplished women, of all races, have fallen out of the historical records. In the music realm, for example, we’ve long known and lauded the name and compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, but few are familiar with his equally gifted sister, Maria Anna Mozart, an accomplished instrumentalist and composer in her own right. In the sciences, we were taught the names of astronauts like John Glenn, but few could recite the names of early NASA scienti...

4.5 rounded up. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of this work to review.This book took a different turn than I expected, I had anticipated it being entirely poetry written during the Harlem Renaissance. Instead the poetry of the author was interspersed with poetry from women during the Harlem Renaissance and when I found this rhythm I discovered that it was an excellent way to cross past and present. The poems feel relevant and fresh, and the way the two work together increases t...

A beautiful illustration of how literature from a previous era can resonate with modern readers and writers. Grimes uses the Golden Shovel form to create new poems that engage with works from the Harlem Renaissance. This form takes a short poem, or a line from a longer poem, to create a new work that includes words from the original (explanation from Grimes’ author’s note). Grimes engages with female poets of the Harlem Renaissance. As she notes in a preface, many Americans know the names of the...

I'm not a huge poetry reader, but this book caught my eye. Even more than the poetry, I think I enjoyed the illustrations that accompanied each poem. Grimes uses the Golden Shovel methodology for her poems, taking a line from each of the featured Harlem Renaissance poems and creating her own poem. I was not familiar with this approach, and I find it fascinating. As with most collections, be it short stories or poems, I really enjoyed some more than others. My biggest frustration was that the inf...