Urban and Poetic
Nikki Grimes grew up in New York City, so she writes just like kids there talk. You might call it "urban" or "youthful" or "contemporary," but it definitely captures the way you'd image a bunch of modern kids from the Bronx talking to each other:
We spent a month reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance in our English class. Then Mr. Ward—that's our teacher—asked us to write an essay about it. Make sense to you? Me neither. I mean, what's the point of studying poetry and then writing essays? So I wrote a bunch of poems instead. (1.3)
Super conversational, right? Tyrone could be chatting us up in the hallway in this passage. This sort of easy, conversational writing style anchors the book as it dives into poetry time and again. When it does, things become more abstract and free-flowing:
Trumpeter of Lenox and 7th
through Jesse B. Semple,
you simply celebrated
Blues and Be-bop
and being Black before
it was considered hip.
You dipped into
the muddy waters
of the Harlem River
and shouted "taste and see"
that we Black folk be good
at fanning hope
and stoking the fires
of dreams deferred. (2.1)
These verses may be written by student poets, but they really know how to turn a phrase, massage a metaphor, and show off some impressive rhymes. Because of this, the poems add an emotional and evocative layer to the book—they invite readers to really feel for the characters. Combined with the prose sections, they give us a pretty complete portrait of Mr. Ward's class.