“First memory: / clinging to the rail. / They were not happy in the living room. / Mama, Dada. / Two big people, hard words / bouncing back and forth. … I didn’t know many words yet, but heard / their edges.” (from “I Stood in My Crib”) Poems about families focus on poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s own family first and foremost, especially her mother and their relationship over time. It’s clear her mother’s ambitions, frustrations, interests, and challenges, including living with depression, imprinted themselves on and influenced Nye’s life from childhood on. Poems that invite reflection on what it means to be a child in relation to the adults in one’s life, and sometimes in opposition to them, may especially resonate with young readers, and be particularly relatable for any living with an adult who has depression. Poems about Nye’s father are also part of this collection that expands in Part Two (“Sometimes We Need a Bigger Family”) to also look at other important people in her childhood and influences in her life. This includes events happening around the world, especially in the Middle East, to which Nye, whose father was Palestinian, has always brought a personal, informed, compassionate lens.

With themes of family, love, kindness, empathy, grief, growing up, and resilience, these one hundred never-before-published poems by the beloved poet, speaker, and teacher Naomi Shihab Nye will resonate with a wide audience.

National Book Award finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye’s Grace Notes: Poems about Families celebrates family and community. This rich collection of one hundred never-before-published poems is also the poet’s most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again.