Themed Collections, Part 2

Last month, I looked at 6 poetry collections, and here I’d like to share 6 more favorites and my thoughts on what gives each collection its unity.

In the Spin of Things: Poetry of Motion, by Rebecca Kai Dotlich – This lively collection of 23 poems is unified by its topic and its poetic voice.

Every poem describes an object that moves, swings, spins, twirls, shakes, and more. The subjects range from windshield wipers to classroom globes to waterfalls. But the focus of these diverse objects is the movement each one makes. So even though the collection includes items large and small, manmade and natural, noisy and quiet, the poems feel like a whole.

And the style of poetry is also very cohesive. Dotlich is known and loved for her perfect rhymes and exact meters. She makes rhyming, bouncing, chanting, poems look incredibly easily. But Dotlich’s poems here are distinctly different from several of her other collections, like Lemonade Sun and Sweet Dreams of the Wild. The poems here are full of slant rhyme and rhythm.