Review 575: Here in Harlem

Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices by Walter Dean Myers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book I got for free as an audiobook from Sync some years back (ten years now!). They used to have summer offerings of free audios, one or two month, and most in the young adult arena. I picked up a handful of these books, yet never listened to any and thought I should get around to it. I started with this fairly short book.

This book of poetry is written in the style of the Spoon River Anthology. Myers wanted to create a community of voices of Harlem that reflected the time of his youth. So each poem is a different person, that starts with their name age and what their job. There is one exception, a woman character who repeats six times and her info is not given.

The audio has sound effects and music accompanying the poems so it makes for an immersive experience. The poems of each person vary to what looks more like a poem than not. While poetry is often abstract and combines words together unexpectedly, these here are more descriptive, more like sentences. Some rhyme some do not.

Taken as a whole you do get a sense of community, the people who populated Harlem and for that I think this book succeeds.

I listened to it all at one time since it is short enough to do so. I have a feeling the audio book is a better way to experience this book than in print, but likely both would work well.