Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems
by Naomi Shihab Nye; illus. by Rafael López
Intermediate, Middle School    Greenwillow    256 pp.    g
9/20    978-0-06-301345-2    $17.99
e-book ed.  978-0-06-301347-6    $9.99

A substantial volume of poems by Nye, the Palestinian American poet and current Young People’s Poet Laureate, is a pleasure on many fronts. This compilation, which includes new poems and others from her past collections (including some originally for adults), is loosely divided into three sections, “The Holy Land of Childhood,” “The Holy Land That Isn’t,” and “People Are the Only Holy Land.” Having so many of Nye’s poems all bumping up against one another reminds us of her particular themes and her deceptively quotidian subjects — meals, family anecdotes, birdwatching, highway signs, relocation, mint tea, coincidences, lost and neglected objects, hope. The poems are sometimes funny but never reductive; and they keep the reader off-balance. We all know about the prohibitions of childhood, but who thinks of “Don’t kiss the squirrel before you bury him”? The poems’ style is conversational and spare of simile, the tone warm, welcoming, inclusive — and occasionally angry. The poem “A Few Questions for Bashar Assad” begins benignly: “We’re curious about your shoes.” We’re a few lines in before we catch the undercurrent of controlled fury. She tackles difficult subjects — war, bereavement, Arab-Jewish relations, refugees — but always with a resonant, stereo point of view: “Love means you breathe in two countries”; “Where we live in the world is never one place.” When she asserts that “not everything is lost,” she has earned her optimism through alert, original, empathetic observation. Lucky the reader who would have this collection on hand for visiting and revisiting.

From the January/February 2021 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.