Life is a tangle of
twisting paths.
Some short.
Some long.
There are dead ends.
And there are choices.
And wrong turns,
and detours,
and yield signs,
and instruction booklets,
and star maps,
and happiness,
and loneliness.
And friends.
And sisters.
And love.
And poetry.

Life is a maze.
You are a maze.
Amazed.
And amazing.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

About the Author:

Naomi Shihab Nye was named a National Book Award finalist for 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East. The author has been honored with a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her award-winning picture books for children include Sitti's Secrets, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter, and Come with Me, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino. Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of a novel, Habibi, and the editor of seven critically acclaimed poetry anthologies for young people. She lives with her family in San Antonio, Texas. In Her Own Words...

Since my books have been some of my best friends all my life, being involved in the making of books is the luckiest, happiest thing I can imagine.

The day Virginia Duncan, my editor for many years now, wrote me her first note stands among my most shining days. She had read some of my poems and asked if I had thought of writing children's books. This is what I tell young writers: when you send your poems out into the world, you have no idea what friends they might find. Thank you, Virginia.

As a child I read all the time. I got lost and found in books, and still do. They are my refuge, escape, my endless journey. (At this moment I have fourteen books on my bedside table and forty-eight books stacked on my dresser.)

I was also fascinated by my mother's small red diary that she had kept as a girl. Her penmanship was exquisitely and perfectly slanted, a talent I did not inherit. She rarely wrote more than "Sawmovie. Got new dress." I wanted to know more details. What color was the dress? I would beg, during our steamy afternoons as she peeled peaches for cobbler and I lay on the floor thumbing through her early life. "I have no idea!" she'd exclaim. "You think I can remember everything?"

I started keeping my own notebooks because I wanted to remember everything. The quilt, the cherry tree, the creek. The neat whop of a baseball rammed perfectly with a bat. My father's funny Palestinian stories. The feeling of breeze as my brother and I rode our bicycles down the hill. The blood-red stain of a ripe strawberry on my fingertips; the rich smell of earth at Mueller's Organic Farm a few blocks from our house.

How lucky we were to have a farm in our neighborhood! My first job was picking berries. I thought about poems as I meandered among damp rows. Thirty-four summers later my photographer- husband, Michael, our son, Madison, and I went to pick berries there again, same farm, same fields, same farmers. Suddenly everything in my life connected.

Familiar sights, sounds, smells have always been my necessities. Let someone else think about future goals and professional lives! I will keep track of the bucket and the hoe, billowing leaves, and the clouds drifting in from the horizon.

Whenever someone asks why I write about "ordinary things," I wonder, "Well, what do you have in YOUR life?" Writing saved me when my family moved to Jerusalem, my father's hometown, and during my years at Trinity University in Texas. I have spent twenty-five years working as a visiting writer with students of all ages. I write essays as well as poems, children's books and songs as well as novels and stories for teens. Material is everywhere, free as air.

Now my husband, son, and I live in a house nearly a hundred years old, a block from the little river, in downtown San Antonio. We have a large wrap-around front porch with a swing, good to read in. The most important thing to me about any room is: how are the reading lamps? The new basketball court in our backyard was finished the same week our terrific Spurs team won the 1999 NBA Championship. Sometimes things fit together! Reading and writing help us see all the many ways this is true.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Nye's (Going Going, reviewed above) sprawling collection of more than 70 poems run the gamut from capturing a moment to probing more abstract ideas and many seem right for a wider audience than just females. The best poems take a detailed image and expose its wider application to daily life. For instance, in Rose, a spider and her delicate web offer a lesson in the beauty that results from measured, persistent care. Big Head, Big Face boasts the merits of simplicity by contrasting a small drawer with a big drawer. Several poems on vocabulary grow awkwardly abstract. The Word Peace takes a common school exercise (making many small words from the letters in one long word) and distorts the idea just enough to be confusing (Peace for example contained the crucial vowels of/ Eat and Easy. If people Ate together/ they would be less likely to Kill one another). But there's plenty of humor here in contemplating language, too. Take the poem You're Welcome! (People who say No problem'/ instead of You're welcome'/ have a problem they don't even/ know about) or a baby-sitter's claim that Baby-sitting should not be called/ sitting. Because it is chasing, bending,/ picking up, and major play. Maher's attractive illustrations open each section. Despite a few uneven selections, Nye's talent is ever in evidence, especially with a trio of Wallace Stevensstyle meditations on a Little Chair and lines such as this one in Over the Weather: Creamy miles of quiet/ Giant swoop of blue. Ages 12-up. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Children's Literature - Karen Leggett

In her newest book of poetry, Naomi Shihab Nye is totally apolitical as she identifies with the dreams and dreads and everyday hassles of adolescent girls. Short verses tantalize the mind with images that touch the soul and remind one just how much can be said with a few carefully chosen words: "Please, live with me in the open slope of a question mark . . . Don't answer it! Curl up in a comma that says more, and more, and more . . . " There are poems about siblings and boys, picking up your room and dealing with bad days. Girls will see their friends, their families, their schools in Nye's words. Boys may gain a better understanding of how girls think. "Walking slowly among tables, I balance my tray, glancing to the side. You're not here today. Are you sick? . . . Whatever the reason your absence is not excused by me." Nye's opening notes draw a connection between the "debris that is to be expected from the vibration of shipping" a holiday wreath and our own passage from one era into another when we feel as if "we are being shaken up, as if our contents are shifting and sifting into new alignments." Her poetry will prompt young readers in the midst of all that shifting to say "yessss — that's just the way it is!" A Maze Me addresses the puzzles of growing up with an amazing collection of words, uplifting, soul-searching, instructive without being pedantic, even suggestive of the kind of poetry young women could write about their own lives. 2005, Greenwillow Books, Ages 10 to 16.

VOYA - Lucy Schall

This charming collection allows young readers to realize that they and their world are probably complicated and amazing. Nye's introduction vividly describes her reluctant teen years and invites girls to write just three lines a day so that they can know who they are, remember what was significant to them, and discover the magic in life's small and simple details. The tiny volume is an excellent model for brief reflections. In five sections, Nye's poems explore universal feelings that each person experiences uniquely: about mind in "Big Head," emotions in "Secret Hum," the physical world in "Magical Geography," experiments and aspirations in "Sweet Dreams Please," and realizations or insights in "Something True." But her poems, as the poet herself, are not so easily classified and often explore all five aspects at once. She observes the rose, a vegetable truck, or shipping directions and snatches them for a poem, a surprise. Several, such as "Sifter" and "The Word Peace," are inspiring writing invitations for young poets and their writing teachers. Librarians will love "The List," Nye's reaction to a no-nonsense reading plan. Some poems, such as "If the Shoe Doesn't Fit," cross gender and are great discussion, bulletin board, or thought-for-the-day material. The book, appealing to women as well as girls, makes a wonderful intergenerational read and a very special gift to bind relationships. VOYA CODES: 5Q 4P M J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Broad general YA appeal; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2005, HarperCollins, 128p., and PLB Ages 11 to 18.

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-A lovely, rich collection that promises to be a lasting companion for young writers. In her introduction, Nye says: "If you write three lines down in a notebook every day-you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That's what I started learning when I was twelve, and I never stopped learning it." The more than 70 poems (nearly every one previously unpublished) are all over the map in terms of subject, but all are in Nye's unique voice: keenly detailed, empathetic, and humorous. Many of the selections focus on feelings particular to girls. Others are universal, such as "High Hopes": "Now that I know the truth,/that I only dreamed someone liked me,/the cat has curled up in a bed of leaves/against the house and I still have to do/everything I had to do before/without a secret hum/ inside." The small format, with bright and pastel-colored, two-page illustrations that introduce the sections, is clearly directed toward girls. The decision to narrow the audience like this is curious. Most of the poems could be appreciated by a wider readership, but it will be the rare boy who would pick up this book. Too bad-it's a keeper.-Nina Lindsay, Oakland Public Library, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Nye begins her newest volume of 72 original poems with a wonderful, compact introduction in which she remembers her own "rough years of transition" and, like her beloved ceramics teacher, hopes to impart "faith about 'growing up.' " Writing for girls 12 and older, the author encourages her readers to "write three lines down in a notebook every day . . . you will find out what you notice," and these poems, one imagines, could have indeed started out as "scribbled details . . . crumbs to help me find my way back." They often deal with the everyday, smaller moments of childhood-a very large spider named Rose, the ring of a vegetable truck, a little chair, a flour sifter-through which quiet pings of meaning reverberate. Subtly, each of the five sections reflects the poet growing older; what she pays attention to changes and, with seeming simplicity, makes "uncanny connections" visible. From "Sifter": "When good days came / I would try to contain them gently / the way flour remains / in the sifter until you turn the handle." A gem. (index) (Poetry. YA)