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    A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
    A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
    A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
    Ebook109 pages38 minutes

    A Maze Me: Poems for Girls

    By Naomi Shihab Nye and Terre Maher

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A collection of seventy-two poems written especially for girls ages twelve and up by the much-honored and beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye. "A lovely, rich collection that promises to be a lasting companion for young writers."—School Library Journal (starred review)

    First love, friendship, school, family, community, having a crush, loving your mother and hating your mother, sense of self, body image, hopes and dreams . . . these seventy-two poems by Naomi Shihab Nye—written expressly for this collection—will speak to girls of all ages. An honest, insightful, inspirational, and amazing collection. "A wide age range will respond to these deeply felt poems about everyday experiences, which encourage readers to lean eagerly into their lives and delight in its passages."—ALA Booklist (starred review). An introduction by the author is included.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 26, 2015
    ISBN9780062340757
    A Maze Me: Poems for Girls
    Author

    Naomi Shihab Nye

    Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother an American of German and Swiss descent, and she spent her adolescence in both Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas. She earned her BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. Naomi Shihab Nye describes herself as a “wandering poet.” She has spent more than forty years traveling the country and the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty books. Her books of poetry for adults and young people include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award); A Maze Me: Poems for Girls; Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners; Honeybee (winner of the Arab American Book Award); Cast Away: Poems of Our Time (one of the Washington Post’s best books of 2020); Come with Me: Poems for a Journey; and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. Her other volumes of poetry include Red Suitcase; Words Under the Words; Fuel; Transfer; You & Yours; Mint Snowball; and The Tiny Journalist. Her collections of essays include Never in a Hurry and I’ll Ask You Three Times, Are You Okay?: Tales of Driving and Being Driven. Naomi Shihab Nye has edited nine acclaimed poetry anthologies, including This Same Sky: Poems from Around the World; The Space Between Our Footsteps: Poems from the Middle East; Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25; and What Have You Lost? Her picture books include Sitti’s Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and her acclaimed fiction includes Habibi; The Turtle of Oman (winner of the Middle East Book Award) and its sequel, The Turtle of Michigan (honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award). Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Award, and ""The Betty,"" from Poets House, for service to poetry, and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry-reading series in the country. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials, including The Language of Life with Bill Moyers, and she also appeared on NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for twenty years and served as poetry editor at the Texas Observer for twenty years. In 2019–20 she was the poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets and laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters named her the winner of the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019–21 Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. In 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Naomi Shihab Nye is professor of creative writing-poetry at Texas State University.

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    Reviews for A Maze Me

    3.5/5

    40 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      4Q, 3P. This book is a beautiful and nostalgic collection of 72 poems that follow the author through a sort of "coming of age" process in five clear sections. While I didn't connect with every poem (who does, in a collection so large?), several of them strongly resonated with my own childhood experiences and memories. Most of the poems involve some gentle prodding or thought-provoking words, but none come across as preachy.I'm not usually one to read much poetry, but this collection was very approachable. A good gateway into poetry for teens or pre-teens
    • 3/5
      3Q, 3P. I'm not someone who reads a lot of poetry in my spare time regardless, but I wasn't intensely blow away by this collection of poetry. I would say that I enjoyed and related to about a little under half of the poems in the book and that the rest weren't anything to be remembered. With the being said, I do think that Nye did a wonderful job of incorporating issues and values that matter, such as family, friendship, love, emotion, and growth. I also like the the book gives a sense of accomplishment to self expression through writer. I believe all writing is good writing and is a way to work through and understand your emotions. I don't know if I would recommend this book to a teen but I definitely wouldn't discourage it.
    • 3/5
      4Q, 3P. Nye's poetry collection takes the reader through a maze of events, feelings, curiosities, and observations. A Maze Me: Poems For Girls offers endearing reflections, some with a touch of whimsy, others with provocative intellect. A gentle yet strong breeze of femininity is woven from poem to poem as Nye explores life, family, friends, school, desires, and dreams. Many of the poems look at the experiences of being a young girl. There's the little girl running on the beach, or the girl who misses her first grade teacher's reading chair, or the girl who remembers the smell of grandma's kitchen. While other poems address more mature concepts. Having a high school crush and dealing with growing out of childhood into adulthood. Nye's poems are varied and diverse. This is a good collection for introducing readers to poetry. However, I imagine a select female audience would mostly be attracted to Nye's poems. Specifically young teenage girls who don't have much experience reading poetry but are interested in trying it out.
    • 3/5
      5Q, 2PI originally thought that the book would be poetry about every stage of growing up, but at one point the voice seemed to pick one age and stay there. I liked parts of some poems (and some entire shorter ones), but wouldn't say that I'm a fan of the whole thing.
    • 3/5
      VOYA Ratings: 4Q, 4PSometimes silly, sometimes somber; this collection of poetry spans the emotional gamut of topics and scenes having to do with youth and growing up. The poignant and perceptive nature of poetry is well executed by Nye in this work and numerous poems and lines help to capture the fleeting beauty and stark realizations that come with retrospections upon childhood as it moves into adulthood.Due to the highly personal nature of some of the poems - as poetry is highly personal and connected to the experiences of the author - many may feel like a bit of a hit and a miss to some readers yet there is still a plethora of sweet and bitter moments that will peek through the veil of memory, allowing readers to see within themselves as Nye looks back upon her youth. This book is truly a treasure that grows more beautiful with time.
    • 3/5
      A good collection of poems by Naomi Shibah Nye about the transition from childhood to adolescence. While geared for girls, many of these poems discuss ideas that are relevant to both genders. I appreciated the poems and their wide variety of topics while still holding the theme together. The small illustrations are a great addition to this compilation.
    • 4/5
      This poetry anthology is meant for girls. It opens with an introduction where the poet describes some of her experiences during adolescence. It inform the poems that follow, which are broken thematically into five sections. Most of the poems talk about life experiences that young girls are familiar with, like school and family. There are a few themes in the book, the most evident probably being self-discovery.As previously mentioned and as stated on the cover of the book, this is a poetry collection for girls. Many poems would also be relatable for boys, but girls are the primary focus. It would probably be best-suited for tween readers who will most identify with the themes and events in the poems. The poems are all short and the language is lyrical but not too complicated, making it very accessible. The variety in tone is nice, with some poems being more serious and others being funnier. These poems could be used as a writing prompt or a mentor text for students to write about their own experiences.
    • 3/5
      My VOYA Rating: 3Q, 2PNye's poetry can be beautiful and thought provoking. She brings memories and musings to surface through her language but most of the poems in this book I just felt blah about. I enjoyed these poems the most:Mystery (pg 13)I Want to Meet the Girl (pg 36)People I Admire (pg 57)Historical Marker (pg 59)To the Tree Frogs Outside the Window (pg 94)To My Texas Handbook (pg 112)
    • 5/5
      5Q, 4P I think that this book of poetry for girls is fantastic! I only give it a rating of 4P because I think it would take some convincing to get a lot of young girls interested in reading a book of poems. It was so full of lightness and depth at the same time that I was captivated. Nye's simple poems are heartfelt and resonate with me as a woman by reminding me of the young girl I once was. I can imagine that they would be equally powerful, if not more so, to a teen or young adult.
    • 3/5
      Nye's collection of poems will appeal to a sense of childhood nostalgia that makes the ordinary world into something a little bit magical. You can almost see Nye's own memories reflected in her quirky but poignant verses, as if they're written sporadically in the way that seemingly disconnected thoughts sometimes surface. I appreciated the personal feel of her poetry, as if anyone could project their own childhood onto her words and remember.
    • 3/5
      4Q, 4P (My VOYA ratings)As is the case with many poetry collections, I found some poems in A Maze Me to be amazing and others to be mediocre. However, the overall quality of the anthology is high, and I ended up rating it a 4Q for its overall lovely writing. The one thing keeping it from a 5Q is its sometimes confusing or esoteric poem style choices—it seems like Nye decided that X amount of certain types of poems should be in the book and some stylistically different or unique poems felt forced.My favorite thing about the book was its diversity almost every teen or tween girl will find something to relate to in this book, and it easily warrants a 4P based on that fact. I can vividly see myself as a boy-crazy teen girl relating to the poem Eye: "Does he recognize my existence?/ Does he see me gleaming/ in my chair?" I think, for nostalgia's sake, my favorite poems in the book were about having crushes--they really seemed to capture the feelings that I had when I was a teen! However, the poems address diverse issues, issues both lofty (the meaning of death, the fate of the world) and self-centered (crushes, family issues). I definitely believe that almost every girl could pick up and enjoy at least one poem in this book.
    • 4/5
      Young girls age 7 and up will love this book filled with poemsfrom their perspective. The poems are short, imagistic, and cute without being cliche. Topics range from shyness, movinghouse, to boys and body image. Written entirely by Naomi Shihab Nye.

    Book preview

    A Maze Me - Naomi Shihab Nye

    Introduction

    At twelve, I worried about a skinny road between two precipices. Every day my mother drove on such a road, or so I imagined, to her job teaching school. I feared her car would slide off one side, into a ditch, or off the other edge, into a murky gray river. But I never told her what I was scared of. I worried day after day without mentioning my fear to anyone, till there was a fist in my stomach, punching me back again and again to check the clock. Wasn’t she late? I was a nervous wreck in secret.

    I did not want to be thirteen, which cast me as something of an oddity among my friends, who were practicing with lipstick and the ratting hair comb deep into the belly of the night. Mary couldn’t wait to be thirteen. She stuffed her bra, packed away her dolls. Susie had been pretending she was thirteen for two years already. Kelly said thirteen was a lot more fun than anything that preceded it.

    But I did not feel finished with childhood. I was hanging on like a desperado, traveling my own skinny road. The world of adults seemed grim to me. Chores and complicated relationships, checkbooks that needed balancing, oppressive daily schedules, and the worrisome car that always needed to have its oil or its tires changed (bald tires sounded so ominous) . . . Couldn’t I stay where I was a bit longer?

    I stared at tiny children with envy and a sense of loss. They still had cozy, comfortable days ahead of them. I was plummeting into the dark void of adulthood against my will. I stared into the faces of all fretful, workaholic parents, thinking condescendingly, You have traveled too far from the source. Can’t you remember what it felt like to be fresh, waking up to the world, discovering new surprises every day? Adulthood is cluttered and pathetic. I will never forget.

    I scribbled details in small notebooks—crumbs to help me find my way back, like Gretel in the darkening forest. Squirrels, silly friends, snoozing cats, violins, blue bicycles with wire baskets, pint boxes of blackberries, and random thoughts I had while weaving 199 multicolored potholders on a little red loom. I sold the potholders door to door for twenty-five cents each, stomping around the neighborhood, feeling absolutely and stubbornly as if I owned it. No one else had ever loved that neighborhood as much as I did.

    If I wrote things down, I had a better chance of saving them.

    Recently, a friend sent me an exquisite wreath in the mail. A tag was attached to it: A SMALL AMOUNT OF DEBRIS IS TO BE EXPECTED FROM THE VIBRATION OF SHIPPING.

    Well, of course.

    But who

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