New Poetry Book

New Poetry Book




Bibliography

Latham, Irene and Waters, Charles. Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship. Minneapolis, MN: Caralrhoda Books. ISBN: 978-1-5124-0442-5


Summary/Analysis

Can I touch Your Hair? is a wonderful poetry book that tells the story of two students who get stuck working together on a poetry project. Irene is white and Charles is black. The topics of the poems cover racial differences in the context of the friendship of the two students. Later on in the book the poems cover deeper topics like police violence against African Americans. The poems serve as a way for the kids to share their experiences and how they are both different and similar. The color of the font for each poem is used to depict who the poem is written by. If it is Irene the title is in white font over black and Charles it is a bold, black font. The poems use their natural language and do not follow a particular rhyme scheme, but they are full of wonderful imagery and metaphors like “sugar-sand white” and “pale as a cloud.” This makes the poems easy to follow and understand. All 33 poems do a good job flowing together and the reader feels like they are listening in on two friends having a conversation. The illustrations by husband and wife Sean Qualls and Selina Alko do a wonderful job adding to each poem and illuminating the similarities and differences of the writers. For the Poems “Officer Brassard” and “News” the illustrations show Charles watching a TV screen depicting the “pale as a cloud” police officers getting a not guilty verdict while Irene’s illustration shows her dad avoiding the bad news and them sitting at a park (where they talk about the difficult issues). The poetry book does contain a table of contents and lists the titles of each poem. The end contains both an author’s note and illustrators’ note discussing the process of writing the poems while at a distance and how the teacher in the book was based on one of Charles’ actual teachers who inspired him and served as a “beacon of light.”



Use


Beach Day


There’s a pack of guys and girls, whose pearly skins

have been baked into a bronzed hue, strolling past me.

Each of them has hair woven into cornrows

or twisted into dreadlocks.

Some of their lips jut out like puffer fish.

When I wave, they look at each other, begin snorting,

laughing at my good manners.

I feel a fury rising inside me, as if I’m a

tidal wave about to crash on land.

I’m confused: why do people who

want to look like me hate me so much?



This poem is a great example of taking something simple, like a day on the beach, and using it to show the different experiences by the two young poets. Read the poem to the class and ask if anyone can help explain what Charles was feeling while at the beach. Have them compare to Irene’s poem. The class could also create a list of things that make them “feel a fury rising” inside of them. They could create one large wave out of paper and display all of the things that make them feel the same way as Charles.