Customer Reviews

Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Blue Lipstick is the perfect book to get teens interested in reading and writing poetry. Buy this and its companion book, Technically, it's not My Fault, and watch the teens in your classroom devour them!

It was amazing. I love it. I discovered this book when I was a sophmore in High School and fell in love with concrete poetry. I connected with the main character, Jessie, and related to her stories. I've checked it out from my local library several times since then and started writing my own concrete poetry. I would definately recommend this book to teens who enjoy poetry, or even who don't because it's not in the usual poetry format teenagers are accustomed to.

John Grandits, Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems (Clarion, 2007)

I might have ended up liking this book better had I known from the outset it's the sequel to another Grandits book (which I haven't read), but I don't know about that. I have a tendency to be very touchy when it comes to the subject of poetry (after all, I wrote the stuff for more years than I care to count), and the plethora of young-adult-oriented "verse novels" in recent years has in general, when I have encountered them, made me want to boil my head in acid rather than have to read another page of the stuff. So, the second strike against the press release that alerted me to this book: it didn't inform me that this was anything other than a single-author collection of poetry. I didn't know it had a plot, however loose that plot may be. Still, I tried to put my prejudices aside and give this a fair shake. I must have, because I didn't end up giving it zero stars--and it's the first "verse novel" that hasn't gotten such.

Jessie is fifteen, the older sister of Robert, from Grandits' earlier book Technically, It's Not My Fault. Blue Lipstick is supposed to be a glimpse into Jessie's journal, a look at the ups and downs of being a teen. And it is that. Whether it is poetry is an entirely different story, but it's much less of a story than it is in the work of Ellen Hopkins or Tonya Lee Stone (neither of whom would know a good poem if it bit either in the face). Grandits at least has a handle on Apollinaire, the originator of the calligramme (which has morphed over the past century into the concrete poem), and it shows. Not constantly, and not well, but it does show, and there are a few pieces in here that surprise and please with plays on words (obviously intentional by Grandits, but not always intentional on the part of Jessie, and this is also impressive). It's not a book of consistently high quality, else I'd be giving it a far higher rating, but it does have its moments. As a way to draw kids into the idea of poetry, it may well work if you hit them with a copy of Apollinaire's Alcools right afterwards to show them what the real thing should be like ("Il Pleut" is still, to this day, the finest example of the calligramme in existence). On its own, though, it may reinforce the kind of negative traits that made [...] a thriving site for so many years. **

My daughter (almost 13) was familiar with the first book by this author and I bought this for her as a gift. She really enjoys these "different" poems!

Might be useful while teaching the concept of concrete (shape) poems to middle school students. Personally, I'm not crazy about this type of poetry. It annoys me when I have to manipulate the printed page around and around and upside down and over and under just to get at the words and meaning. I especially don't want to have to dig around for a mirror in order to decipher mirror writing. I can see where it might seem "fun" for students and would be a good book to add to your arsenal of poetry books. Never hurts to have concrete examples of any type of writing. I believe concrete poems should be read in small doses. Whole books seem a little contrived, as if the author is trying too hard to come up with increasingly clever formats. One last criticism--I'm not crazy when adult males use the voice of young adolescent girls and take on that persona in their writing. In this case, the author, John Grandits, writes in the voice of Jessie, a seventh grade girl. I'm not saying that he doesn't, at times, pull it off, but I can't get the image out of my mind of a grown man writing about having "a bad hair day", or the problem of seeing underwear through a black skirt, or chastising a younger brother to take "the oranges out of my bra." The poems just sort of lose their credibility. (IMHO) It also seems a little creepy. I remember reading the book, She's Come Undone, and really loving it. However, the fact that a man was writing as a female caused the author to hover in the narrative more than I wanted. ("How does this guy know so much about how a woman would feel getting her period? etc., etc..... you get the drift. ) In the author's defense, this book is a flanker, riding on the success of his first book, Technically, It's Not My Fault, more concrete poems following the adventures of Jessie's brother, Robert. I suppose writing the next book from the point of view of Robert's sister seemed like the logical sequel.