Thylias Moss Literature

I want to be
Pictures by Jerry Pinckney

Author: Moss, Thylias

After some thought a young African-American girl describes in poetic terms the kind of person she wants to be.

Booklist Review: Books for Youth, For the Young: Ages 5-9. This begins with a young girl who is asked by several people what she wants to be. She doesn't have a ready response, but once she has time to think, she comes up with some extraordinary answers. "I want to be big but not so big that a mountain or a mosque or a synagogue seems small. . . . I want to be quiet but not so quiet that nobody can hear me. I also want to be sound, a whole orchestra with two bassoons and an army of cellos." And on a more whimsical note: "I want to be in motion but I want the ants in my pants to sometimes take a vacation." Most of all, "I want to be all the people I know, then I want to know more people so I can be them all. . . . I want to be life doing, doing everything. That's all." The ambitious text at times goes over the top and becomes pretentious in its imagery, but there is much here with which children can identify. All the pulling and pushing of life comes out in Moss' lilting writing, feelings that kids know all too well. Pinkney's lovely watercolor illustrations, featuring the African American narrator with her hair in cornrows, exude a life-affirming vitality and the sense that anything is possible. Use this as a starting point for discussion to get kids talking about what they would like to be. ((Reviewed Oct. 1, 1993)) -- Ilene Cooper

Publishers Weekly Review: A much-lauded poet brings her gifts for stretching language and patterning images to the perennial, pedestrian query, "What do you want to be?" An African American girl ponders this question as she meanders home, and her thoughts seem to take as many detours as she does on her journey. She begins playfully--"I made a grass mustache, a dandelion beard, and bird nest toupee"--and grows ever more abstract: "I double-dutched with strands of rainbow. Then I fastened the strands to my hair and my toes and became a fiddle that sunbeams played. Then I sang with the oxygen choir." When she reaches home, the girl voices a string of aspirations: "I want to be quiet but not so quiet that nobody can hear me. I also want to be sound, a whole orchestra with two bassoons and an army of cellos. Sometimes I want to be just the triangle, a tinkle that sounds like an itch." Some readers may need to be guided through the kaleidoscope of metaphors that tumble across the pages; considering each image individually may elicit the greatest response. Pinkney's liquid watercolors, more impressionistic here than in A Starlit Somersault Downhill (see review above), also employ a more vibrant palette. Bright yellows, greens and reds suffused with light heighten the dreamlike quality of the text. Both author and illustrator push the limits of their arts; they deliver illusions with the texture of truth. Ages 4-8. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews /* Starred Review */ The untrammeled exuberance of a free-spirited youngster, eager to explore everything, sings through a poetic story. When neighbors ask a young African-American what she'd like to be and she lacks a ready answer, she lets her imagination soar while pondering attributes she might claim ("big," "strong," "old," "fast," "wise," "beautiful," "green," "weightless") and concluding: "I want to be life doing, doing everything." The unnamed narrator, in sneakers, tie-dyed shirt and cutoff overalls, is Pinkney's latest handsome young heroine (cf. Mirandy and Brother Wind, 1988; The Talking Eggs, 1989). His watercolors burgeon with flowers, butterflies, rainbows, and busy, happy people (Brother Wind makes a cameo appearance). In Moss's headlong style, image piles on image; but Pinkney's artistic ingenuity matches even her most over-the-top similes: "a train moving in the sun like a metal peacock's glowing feather on tracks that are like stilts a thousand miles long laid down like a ladder up a flat mountain (wow!)...." Exhilarating, verbally and visually: the very essence of youthful energy and summertime freedom. (Picture book. 5-10)
(Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1993)

Other Contributors:
Pinkney, Jerry

Other titles associated with this book:
Want to be

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0803712863
0803712871
0613080378 : Prebind - Juvenile
0140562869 : Paperback - Juvenile
0606135111 : DEMCO Turtleback - Juvenile

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• MetaMetrics, Inc.
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 112960

Tokyo butter: a search for forms of Deirdre : poems
Thylias Moss

Author: Moss, Thylias

A new collection by the National Critics Book Circle Award finalist author of Last Chance fro the Tarzan Holler features pieces that explore searches for vestiges of a beloved deceased cousin, a missing college student, and the author's true self.

New York: Persea Books, 2006, 112 p.

Publishers Weekly Review: This eighth outing from MacArthur "genius" grant winner Moss (Slave Moth, 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons???Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song???these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: "any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor." Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: "Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out." The long central poem "Deirdre: A Search Engine" includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: "we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery"; "without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it." This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind. (Oct.) --Staff (Reviewed July 31, 2006) (Publishers Weekly, vol 253, issue 30, p54)

Other titles associated with this book:
Search for forms of Deirdre

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0892553197

Credits:
• Novelist/EBSCO Publishing
• Baker & Taylor
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Added to NoveList: 20061020
• TID: 148895