Moving Words about a Flower

The life cycle of a resilient dandelion that sprouts in a crack of a busy city sidewalk is written as a concrete poem. The dandelion’s seeds blow far from the city, landing in a field where they sprout. The story takes place over the four seasons, describing how the dandelion survives: “At last the child found it, plucked it, and took a mighty breath…and whoosh!” The full-color gouache artwork begins in a gray city and moves to the green field with a blue sky. The text is placed on the pages to mirror the movement of rain, wind, and snow. People are shown with different skintones, and the…

Growing in the crack of a sidewalk, a little dandelion sets seeds sailing to a new meadow home. Following the seeds’ journey from the concrete jungle to a lush summer field, readers will learn all about the little plant’s life cycle and versatile habits. The clever integration of text, color, and imagery has the words dancing across the pages in the style of shape or concrete poetry. When a rainbow appears, the multi-hued words arc across the scene. As the dandelion seeds lie dormant through the winter, stolid lines of chunky text evoke the oppressive weight of heavily falling snow. Deer…

Moving Words About a Flower brings the life cycle of a dandelion to vivid motion through a concrete poem, the words visually capturing the journey of three seeds through the four seasons. The title page sets the stage beautifully, with the author’s and illustrator’s names serving as the stem of a dandelion, grounding the reader in nature’s rhythms. On the opening spread, phrases such as “a million silver raindrops” and “falling falling falling” cascade like an active rainstorm, with the word “splash” mimicking drops bouncing off the sidewalk. Fonts shift in size and color, growing “bigger and…