Weekend Pick for April 22, 2022

Weekend Pick for April 22, 2022

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​Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam

​This weekend’s pick is another celebration of beauty in narrative verse: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, a National Book Award finalist. I am absolutely in love with this text, and I can’t recommend it enough for everyone to read, especially as we continue to recognize National Poetry Month this April - the minute I finished it I turned right back to the beginning to start rereading it! This is the story of Amal Shahid, a young Black teen who at the beginning of the story finds himself in the courts, awaiting a verdict after being charged with aggravated assault and battery after a neighborhood fight he and his friends were involved in. The reader doesn’t know all the details of the fight yet; those details come out as the story progresses, when Amal is found guilty and sent to a juvenile detention center. And so the reader begins a journey with Amal in hopes that his conviction will be overturned. Each page brings a new poem with a provocative title that speaks to that sense of hope in the face of injustice. 

​But Amal’s story is unique to his own identity and experience, as would be that of every other boy in that detention center - something the reader comes to understand as they listen to Amal. Amal is not just a boy who made a mistake, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time - he is a poet and an artist. He is a passionate young man with a thirst for knowledge and a love for deep books. He is a son, and a brother, and a friend, and a romantic interest, and the reader gets to know him in all these ways. He is more than the crime itself, or the headlines, or the brief quips of those who spoke at his trial (watch for the testimony of his art teacher, Ms. Rinaldi, if you want to see how injustice perpetuates itself in our school and court systems).  

​This book is so gorgeously creative in its storytelling, weaving the poems together amidst pages and pages of black ink sketches that shape our vision through Amal’s eyes and heart. Each poem takes us one step further into the very dehumanizing world of incarceration, and each poem is Amal’s desperate attempt to stay afloat in such an overwhelming sea of violence and despair. He turns to his poems, rhymes and sketches to see him through, along with the help of a new teacher and prison abolitionist Imani Dawson, who urges him to write his truth. The cover art pays tribute to the metaphors at work in his paintings, the beautiful butterflies that stand testimony to the chrysalis he and all the boys in the detention center must endure as the world seeks to rob them of their very souls. 

​About the authors - Ibi Zoboi is an exceptional writer, author of American Street (also a National Book Award finalist) and my personal favorite, Pride - a modern, Brooklyn remix of the classic Pride and Prejudice (a side note - I’ve taught Pride to my seniors, and they’ve loved it, so I highly recommend that one too!). You may recognize Yusef Salaam as one of the Exonerated Five, the wrongly convicted young men in the Central Park jogger case. Dr. Salaam is a poet, activist and inspirational speaker. While Punching the Air is not his personal story, it is informed by his own experiences as a young poet having been incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. This collaboration between Zoboi and Salaam, which both speak to in the end notes, is the end result of two people whose belief in the power of youth voices serves to remind us of all young people’s beauty and humanity.  

Ibi Zoboi

Yusef Salaam

Until next week,
​Sarah