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6 Book Bingo 2024

About This Category: A Book of Poetry

For this category, students will read a poetry book of their choosing. In the Berkeley Carroll Libraries, poetry is primarily found within the Nonfiction Collection. Materials classified as literature are in Dewey decimal class 800, and most of our poetry can be found in the 810 section. However, there are other books written in verse that can be found in other sections.

Reading Suggestions From The BC Library: Novels In Verse

Hurricane Dancers

Quebrado has been traded from pirate ship to ship in the Caribbean Sea for as long as he can remember. The sailors he toils under call himel quebrado--half islander, half outsider, a broken one. Now the pirate captain Bernardino de Talavera uses Quebrado as a translator to help navigate the worlds and words between his mother's Taíno Indian language and his father's Spanish. But when a hurricane sinks the ship and most of its crew, it is Quebrado who escapes to safety. He learns how to live on land again, among people who treat him well. And it is he who must decide the fate of his former captors. Latino interest.

Call No: HISTORICAL FIC ENG

The Crossover

Fourteen-year-old twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court as their father ignores his declining health.

Call No: REALISTIC FIC ALE ► Find eBook in Sora 

Love That Dog

Love That Dog shows how one boy named Jack finds his voice with the help of a teacher, a pencil, some yellow paper, and of course, a dog. Written as a series of free-verse poems from Jack's point of view, and with classic poetry included in the back matter, this novel is perfect for kids and teachers, too. Jack hates poetry. Only girls write it and every time he tries to, his brain feels empty. But his teacher, Miss Stretchberry, won't stop giving her class poetry assignments--and Jack can't avoid them. But then something amazing happens. The more he writes, the more he learns that he does have something to say. "I guess it does look like a poem when you see it typed up like that.

Call No: REALISTIC FIC CRE

Brown Girl Dreaming

The author shares her childhood memories and reveals the first sparks that ignited her writing career in free-verse poems about growing up in the North and South.

Call No: HISTORICAL FIC WOO

Free Verse

When her brother dies in a fire, Sasha Harless has no one left, and nowhere to turn. After her father died in the mines and her mother ran off, he was her last caretaker. They'd always dreamed of leaving Caboose, West Virginia together someday, but instead she's in foster care, feeling more stuck and broken than ever. But then hen Sasha discovers family she didn't know she had, and she finally has something to hold onto, especially sweet little Mikey, who's just as broken as she is. Sasha even makes her first friend at school, and is slowly learning to cope with her brother's death through writing poetry, finding a new way to express herself when spoken words just won't do. But when tragedy strikes the mine her cousin works in, Sasha fears the worst and takes Mikey and runs, with no plans to return.

Call No: REALISTIC FIC DOO

Reading Suggestions From The BC Library: Poetry

One Last Word

In this collection of poetry, Nikki Grimes looks afresh at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance -- including voices like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and many more writers of importance and resonance from this era -- by combining their work with her own original poetry. Using "The Golden Shovel" poetic method, Grimes has written a collection of poetry that is as gorgeous as it is thought-provoking.

Call No: 811 GRI

Poisoned Apples

A collection of free verse poems that explores how girls are taught to think about themselves, their bodies, their friends--as consumers, as objects, as competitors.

Call No: 811 HEP

Poetry Speaks Expanded

Collects works by forty-seven important poets, arranged chronologically by birth order from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to Sylvia Plath, and includes biographies, essays by accomplished contemporary poets, and CD recordings of each featured poet reading his or her own works.

Call No: 811.008 POE

Poems of New York

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry–ranging from Walt Whitman’s exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets’ moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city. All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes’s Harlem to James Merrill’s Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices. 

Call No: 811.008 POE

Indivisible

Anthology including over 50 works of poetry by 20th century writers on issues related to social justice. Foreword by Common.

Call No: 811.008 IND

Dog Songs

Mary Oliver's Dog Songs is a celebration of the special bond between human and dog, as understood through the poet's relationship to the canines that have accompanied her daily walks, warmed her home, and inspired her work. Oliver's poems begin in the small everyday moments familiar to all dog lovers, but through her extraordinary vision these observations become higher meditations on the world and our place in it.  

Call No: 811 OLI

Voices in the Air

This volume of almost one hundred original poems is a stunning and engaging tribute to the diverse voices past and present that comfort us, compel us, lead us, and give us hope. Voices in the Air is a collection of almost one hundred original poems written by the award-winning poet Naomi Shihab Nye in honor of the artists, writers, poets, historical figures, ordinary people, and diverse luminaries from past and present who have inspired her. Full of words of encouragement, solace, and hope, this collection offers a message of peace and empathy.

Call No: 811 NYE

The Dream Keeper and Other Poems

This classic collection of poetry is available in a new gift edition that includes seven additional poems written after The Dream Keeper was first published. In a larger format, featuring Brian Pinkney's scratchboard art on every spread, Hughes's inspirational message to young people is as relevant today as it was in 1932.

Call No: 811 HUG

Reading Suggestions From the BC Library: Short Stories