Poetry Book Review: Yum! Mmmm! Que Rico!

YUM! MMMM! QUE RICO! AMERICAS’ SPROUTINGS
Written by Pat Mora
Pictures by Rafael Lopez
Lee & Low Books, 2007

The Poems: Yum! MmMm! Que Rico! was one of my favorite children’s poetry books of 2007. I think it’s a terrific combination of haiku about edible plants native to the Americas, factual information about these foods, and vibrant artwork. Although Mora adheres to the traditional 5-7-5 format of this poetic form—hers are not your typical haiku. I think these “New World” haiku will be less abstract and more tangible to the mind of a child. Although many children may never have tasted a papaya or a prickly pear—many will have eaten, seen, smelled, and touched pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, pineapples, peanuts, blueberries, and pecans. I think children will be able to relate to the haiku about these particular foods and the sensory experiences Mora describes when cooking and eating them.

Here are some examples of imagery and figurative language from Mora’s poems:

Chocolate is “brown magic melting on your tongue.”
A pineapple wears “a stiff prickly hat.”
Mashed potatoes are “salt and pepper clouds.”
A pumpkin is “autumn’s orange face.”
When a cooked cranberry pops in a pot, there are “scarlet fireworks.”
Melting vanilla ice cream runs down a cone “cooling your warm summer laugh.”
On eating papaya: “Chewing your perfume/we taste your leafy jungle.”

Classroom Connection: Mora’s haiku are refreshing and innovative. They are good examples of how a writer can respond in an imaginative way to different foods and to an experience as common as eating. A classroom teacher could certainly use Mora’s book as an inspiration for a classroom poetry-writing activity. Imagine a teacher bringing in foods like kiwi fruit, avocados, mushrooms, mangoes, scallions, bananas, apples, and strawberries for students to observe, eat, and then write poems about. The students could describe the foods in regard to how they look, smell, feel(the textures of the foods on the hands and in the mouth), and taste. Students could also be encouraged to make comparisons and to use figurative language as Mora did when describing the foods and gustatory sensations. (I tried a lesson similar to this with poems by Valerie Worth--Raw Carrots, Mushroom, Asparagus--and it was very successful.)

One year, I also did a lesson for National Education Week pairing the observation and tasting of foods with writing. I called the activity See It, Feel It, Smell It, Taste It, Write It. Parents sat with their children “experiencing” different edible objects like marshmallows and round slices of lemon. Then the parents and their children wrote about the foods using comparisons.

Informative Prose: One thing that sets this book apart from most collections of haiku poetry is Mora's inclusion of factual information about “Americas’ sproutings.”

Here are a few “tasty” factual tidbits Mora serves up in her prose paragraphs:

Native Americans ground blueberries for use in medicine, and European settlers boiled blueberries with milk to make gray paint. The word chocolate is derived from the word xoxolatl, which means “bitter water.” The Totonac Indians from Mexico used vanilla to make perfume, medicine, and insect repellant. A substance found in the milky liquid of unripe papayas is used in meat tenderizers. It was once believed that that pumpkin could be used to remove freckles and cure snakebites.

The Illustrations: Lopez’s illustrations rendered in acrylic on wood panels are exuberant and alive with color. They transform this book into a true celebration of edible plants native to the Americas. The textured, stylistic paintings are full of joy and humor—a sandal-wearing pineapple dances with maracas in one hand, red juice runs down the chin of a smiling boy as he relishes a fresh tomato, a drum-playing boy parties with his sandwich as they dance in a river of gooey peanut butter, flames sprout from the mouth of a sweating father who has just bitten into a chile pepper, and simmering cranberries explode from a pot in a cloud of purple steam bursting with pink, orange, aqua, and blue fireworks. Lopez’s art is a visual delight!

Click here to see two illustrations from the book.

Edited to add: Click here to see a preview of the book.

Note: Mora expresses her gratitude to her husband, a professor of anthropology who teaches a course on the Origins of Agriculture, and ethno-botanist Gary Paul Nathan for their help. She also includes a short list of sources.

Although not every one of Mora’s haiku pops with a surprise or a clever twist at the end, there is plenty to excite the eyes and the literary palates of readers in Yum! Mmmm! Que Rico!. Yum! Mmmm! It’s a delicious melange of tasty haiku, savory facts, and luscious illustrations.

Karen Edmisten is hosting the Poetry Friday Roundup this week.