Summer

Do you have time to get away with friends or family? 

These can be fun moments that create lasting memories-- like the ones Charles Water describes in "Fishing Trip" in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

Service

Did you know that teens volunteer 2.4 billion hours annually and that is worth. $34.3 billion to the US economy?

It may start out as an assignment or a service project, but the intangible benefits are even bigger.

Here's Janet Wong's poem, "Community Service," for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

Eviscerate

Need a new SAT word to learn? 
How about EVISCERATE. 
Read this poem for the vocabulary AND the puns!

Michael Salinger wrote this poem, "Eviscerate," for The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

Loss

This poem, "He Was So Little" by David L. Harrison (from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School) gives us words for the difficult feelings we experience when a much-loved pet is gone. 

Love

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is a poem from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School. It's about love, but with a warning tucked inside. 

"Advice to Rapunzel" by Eileen Spinelli. Food for thought...

Fear

Time to restart, and rethink. What are we afraid of? Let's fight those fears!

Here's a downloadable poem postcard featuring Sara Holbrook's poem, "Fear Factor," from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.

And here are the Take 5 activities that go with this poem.

"The Cafe" by Guadalupe Garcia McCall

The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School continues to reach new readers. At the YALSA Symposium (Young Adult Library Services Association), poet Guadalupe Garcia McCall read one of her poems from the book and we managed to capture it on film here. It's "The Café" featured in the Eighth Grade section, Week 13: Families, page 205. 

Brace yourself. 
It's bittersweet and thought-provoking (and somewhat autobiographical).

Poetry Posters & Postcards

One of the things I love about poetry is how it conjures up images in our minds. What do you picture when you read a favorite poem? Talking about our (multiple) interpretations for a single poem is an interesting window into our own experiences and emotions. This is something young adults really "get." They enjoy linking poems they're reading with their own life experiences and understandings.

But they are also often surprised to discover that we can have very different images of the same poem. One way to highlight this imagistic power of poetry is to use poems in conjunction with images, matching poems and pictures that seem to go together. We have taken this idea and created several poem posters and postcards that pair poems with contemporary photographs. You can download and/or print them at the Pomelo Books site here. 

Here is one example from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School, just to get you started.