Ekua Holmes burst on the children’s book scene in 2015 with her phenomenal debut, the multiple award–winning — including a Caldecott Honor — Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement (written by Carole Boston Weatherford). But she didn’t come out of nowhere. She was an established fine artist in Boston before she delved into the children’s book world. And aren’t we glad she did! Out of Wonder is the pairing of this extraordinary artist with poets Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley, and Marjory Wentworth. They have taken for their inspiration the forms, themes, and rhythms of a slew of well-known poets, both ancient and living, and have created new verse inspired by their works.

Holmes brings the vibrancy of her layered, richly tactile collage to each poem, presented on double- or single-page spreads. While her media remains the same — collage made of homemade and boldly patterned papers with a dash of paint carefully thrown in — each illustration is as much an homage to the poet of inspiration as to the new verses that are on the page. And the starburst pattern, a signature element in Voice of Freedom, makes a return appearance in several images.

I love how Holmes manifests each inspirational poet’s cadence, rhythm, and thematic focus in her creative choices. On the two pages depicting “How to Write a Poem: Celebrating Naomi Shihab Nye,” two young people playfully dance with scraps of paper, from yellow-legal-pad sheets to gauzy homemade strips, as the verse describes writers metaphorically releasing their own poetic voice to dance. And we see echoes of loss and searching, so evident in Nye’s work, toyed with in these images. Are these young poets chasing after lost verse, or have they released their worlds into the world? Is it both?

We see Billy Collins’s everydayness in an extreme close-up of a bowl of oatmeal and spoon on a patterned tablecloth. We see Mary Oliver’s reverence for the natural world in a vertical, prayer-niche-shaped window, with puzzle-piece birds that fit together like stained-glass, all in tones of forest greens and sky blues. Gwendolyn Brooks’s blues-inspired, character-driven verse is reflected in Holmes’s richly hued illustration. Holmes layers a central figure of a black woman singing and playing the piano against sheet music painted in vibrant goldenrod and pulsating burgundy. The languid movements of the singer are contrasted by the energy and movement of the zigzag lines in the marbleized paper used to create her dress in lovely counterpoint. And the soaring verse of Maya Angelou is evident in the image of a woman who could be Angelou herself reaching diagonally across the double-page spread in gratitude toward the rising sun. This hope-filled and inspirational illustration is the sunniest and brightest of the lot, in jewel-toned colors and bedazzled with inviting circles, all mirroring Angelou’s legendary work “On the Pulse of Morning.”

While the Caldecott committee may find much to love in these expansively illustrated pages, there will be one question that they will likely discuss in regards to this book (and possibly others): Is it a picture book? And while definitions of picture books abound, I like to use a simple one: Are the illustrations essential to telling the story, presenting the information, or, in this case, visualizing the poetry? If so, then it is a picture book. If not, it is an illustrated book.

What it is going to boil down to is whether or not committee members can successfully argue that this is a picture book if there any differing opinions. Robin Smith brought up the picture book vs. illustrated book question when she reviewed Holmes’s Voice of Freedom for this blog before it won its Caldecott Honor. Will Out of Wonder raise the same questions? As Robin reminded us in that post, the Caldecott manual states:

“A ‘picture book for children,’ as distinguished from other books with illustrations, is one that essentially provides the child with a visual experience. A picture book has a collective unity of story-line, theme, or concept, developed through the series of pictures of which the book is comprised.”

I often think poetry and nonfiction are at a disadvantage in the picture book vs. illustrated book debate in Caldecott discussions. Works without a traditional narrative may feel like they lack “collective unity.” Holmes’s color palette changes from page to page, and her lines are loose and flowing on one page (see the Pablo Neruda spread) and tightly geometric on another (see the William Carlos Williams panel). Does this give the book a disjointed feel? Does this mar the “collective unity” of the project? I would argue that her change in style is in service to the book and its goal: to bring readers into each new poet’s world. A more matchy-matchy (to borrow a term from fashion) approach would not have supported this effort.

So back to our question: Is it a picture book? Are these illustrations essential to the work; do they provide a visual experience for children; do they have collective unity of concept? While I can read Alexander's, Colderley's, and Wentworth’s verse without Holmes’s art, can I grasp the full impact of the verse without them? With Holmes, I viscerally feel, without even looking at the verse, Chief Dan George’s deep and expansive love for the natural world in the full-bleed illustration of gauzy papers lushly layered in a forest scene; I sense the quiet introspection of Robert Frost’s work in a lone finger walking away from the reader and leaving nothing but tracks in the lacy snow.

So what’s your take? Is it a picture book? And while I am sure there is another Caldecott in the cards for Holmes, is this her year?

Read the starred Horn Book Magazine review of Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets.

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