Customer Reviews

Poems from Homeroom: A Writer's Place to Start

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

 

 

Kathi Appelt, Poems from Homeroom: A Writer's Place to Start (Henry Holt, 2002)

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about this book. I love the second section of it, where Appelt goes into the ideas behind the poems and provides exercises for young readers to get to writing (even if she does make the usual mistake of calling 5-7-5 an established form, rather than a guideline, in English haiku). As for the poems themselves, the jury's still kind of out. Attention is paid to the crafting of them, which in itself makes them rise to above average in today's world of published poetry; if there is a problem, it's that the narrative structure of much of the poetry tends to get away from the image, and so some of it sounds like prose broken up into lines rather than poetry. Appelt is very good at using form, though, and when she does this collection shines.

Overall, there's more good than bad here. Worth checking out. ***

I love this book! Kathi Appelt presents some of her own poetry with the inspirations behind each poem and suggestions for students trying to write their own. There are many good writing prompts, and she explores different styles of poetry. I found this to be a very useful resource as a middle school ELA teacher.

My daughter enjoys writing poems and really enjoyed these age appropriate poems written by her peers

Daniel Whedbee




The book I read was "Poems from Homeroom", by Kathi Appelt.
The main focus in this book seems to be about younger people and problems they had. For the most part, most of the poems weren't great, but they were good.
"Good Job Buddy", was my personal favorite. It is about a young man who work's late night at a supermarket. Every night at the same time a girl comes in there after she gets off work. She never talks to anyone, she's always quiet. The man secretly has a major crush on her, but is too scared and shy to talk to her. So one night, he gets the courage, and just grabs a cart, runs as fast as he can hops on the cart and crashes right next to her. She then runs up and asks him, "Are you okay?" It doesn't say what happens next but I'm sure they lived happily ever after.
Seeing as I don't often read books of poems my review may not be that good, but I believe this book is a good book for someone my age, around 15 or maybe a little younger. Some of the poems sound redundant, but they are still good. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.
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