PARTLY CLOUDY, Poems of Love and Longing by Gary Soto

Soto, Gary. PARTLY CLOUDY, Poems of Love and Longing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. ISBN  978054757737.

Gary Soto has made generous contributions to multicultural literacy in the past and continues to do so.  This particular work, however, does not have the typical cultural markers aside from the cultures of male and female.  Partly Cloudy is divided into two sections:  A Girl’s Tears, Her Songs, and A Boy’s Body, His Words.  Even these titles reveal the cultural differences of male and female: male being more physical (A Boy’s Body) and female more emotional (A Girl’s Tears).  In this volume Soto unites cultures into the human cultural experience of adolescent love and loss.  In each section, one can relive feelings, doubts, joys and sorrows of those awkward years that no one wants to do again.
 

Kirkus claims these seventy-seven poems of free verse to be “Tender and truthful love poetry for teens…”  Horn Book says “The free-verse poems all somehow ring true…” Forest of Boulders was one of many that certainly rang true to me.  I found this poem to be particularly poignant in exemplifying the imagery of a boy’s disappointment that feels defining and eternal.

Forest of Boulders by Gary Soto

Out of love,

I’m going to walk

Into the forest

And sit next to

 A gray boulder.

Rain will fall,

Thickets grow

Around my feet

Until after

So many years

I will blend into

That boulder.

Then another boy

My age, hurt

In the heart,

Will hunker next to me.

Rain will fall,

Hawks settle

On his hardening

Shoulders

Until he, too,

Becomes a boulder.

 

Time passes.

Shooting stars cut across

The sky. The president declares

It a national park. 

Hikers will climb

Over and step

Around these boulders

In the forest, where boys go

When a girl says no.

I think this book would have teen appeal and spark up any English literature class that studies Romeo and Juliet or any other love story from any culture or time period, fiction or non-fiction.  You could compare Soto’s love lines with those in Shakespeare to contemporize the look of love, or compare other love poems from African American writers, Asian writers, French writers, or any cultures relevant to your class.

If awards were raindrops, Soto’s would end a drought.  The Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature and the Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association are just two on his prestigious list.  He even has a library and a museum bearing his name.  With so much accomplishment, he just might know something about love too!