I’ve always been fascinated by volcanoes. When you grow up in Hawaiʻi, it’s a point of pride being able to claim that your home state has the largest active volcano on Earth (Mauna Loa), and it’s also the only state situated entirely on an archipelago. Kīlauea’s most recent (and ongoing) eruption on the Big Island started in December 2024, while Mauna Loa last spouted off in 2022.

The breathtaking spectacle of molten lava slowly making its way to the ocean and thereafter creating new land is both humbling and awe-inspiring. When I read Joan Bransfield Graham and Tania García’s brand new poetry picture book, Awesome Earth: Concrete Poems Celebrate Caves, Canyons and Other Fascinating Landforms (Clarion Books, 2025), I was reminded of how our home planet is an ever evolving, dynamic entity full of beauty and wonder.

FANTASTIC FORCES

The earth is
unsettled, it would seem,
for here and about it lets off
steam. Lava flows, geysers gush,
canyons are carved by a river's push.
The Earth's old crust cracks and creaks,
shakes and shoves up mountain peaks.
Ice caps recede, glaciers advance,
ever in motion -- a global dance.
Will it ever stand still?
Not a chance!

Fun to read and loaded with fascinating information, Awesome Earth is Graham’s valentine to the planet and a budding geologist’s dream. Her use of concrete poetry to describe a variety of landforms is the perfect way to celebrate their physical attributes, whether Continent or Island, Hill or Valley, Plain or Plateau. After all, landforms are all about size, shape, and structure; they themselves are a kind of topographical poetry.

Kids will find the 20+ poems delightfully accessible as Graham strikes a friendly tone via (mostly) first person point of view and personification to establish a sense of immediacy and direct engagement. Who could resist an amiable Island explaining the difference between his continental and oceanic ilk, or smaller “mini-me” versions of himself? He even invites readers to visit sometime — so charming!

We also get a sense of Mountain’s pride and majesty, as he seeks the sky, “enrobed with snow,” piercing the clouds, and I’m only too willing to forgive Peninsula’s boast: “I’ve got miles and miles of rocky or sandy, dandy coast!”

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