The Horn Book Guide

LITERATURE

Grady, Cynthia

I Lay My Stitches Down: Poems of American Slavery

40 pp. | Eerdmans | October, 2011 | Trade ISBN 978-0-8028-5386-8 $17.00

(2) 4-6 Illustrated by Michele Wood. Grady crafts her fourteen poems to honor the art of quiltmaking. Pieces recall quilt squares by using ten lines of ten syllables each. Working in intensely hued acrylics, Wood bases her quilt-shaped designs on the patterns that give the poems their titles, incorporating forms into carefully composed scenes inhabited by heroic, emotion-charged figures. Author's and illustrator's notes are appended. Reading list.

Reviewer: Joanna Rudge Long | Horn Book Magazine Issue: January, 2012