Title: Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems
Author: John Grandits
Illustrator: John Grandits
Publisher: Clarion Books
Copyright: 2007
Pages: 42
Genre/Category: Poetry
This book is absolutely fascinating and very unique. It’s eclectic and
quirky. I have never seen a poetry collection quite like this one. Blue
Lipstick is a collection of concrete poems about everyday topics in the
life of a teenager. There are poems about school, life, family, sports, and
more. These poems are mostly free verse with a few haiku added. The poems are
arranged into shapes. Some swirl around the page so you have to constantly turn
the book to read it. A lot of these poems read more like journal entries or a
blurb from a story rather than a traditional poem – but I think that’s the
point. These aren’t traditional poems that follow a pattern. These are poems
that a child can relate to.
The illustrations in this book were done with a marker and touched up
in Photoshop. There is a list in the back of the book that shows the fifty plus
fonts that were used for the text. Most of the pages are filled with text, but
there are some drawings with thick, crayon-looking lines and computer generated
shapes. There is a lot of white space on nearly every page, with a few colors
making an appearance, namely, blue and black.
This book is appropriate for higher grades, maybe sixth grade and up. I’m
sure some of the poems could be read to lower grades, but some of the subject
matter and vocabulary is appropriate for older students. This would be a great
book to introduce students to free verse poems and to show students that poems
don’t have to follow a format of top to bottom, left to right. I could use this
book in a lesson on poetry to give students ideas of how to write concrete
(shaped) poems.
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