Brown Girl Dreaming - Jacqueline Woodson

I've read a lot of memoirs, but none that were done as a series of poems before. It really is a beautiful way to convey your story. My favorite was the first one, about the day she was born. Woodson brings her birth together with the state of black in America and it's done masterfully.

I'm not sure how many people can do memoir in this fashion, but this does a better job of explanation some things about the Civil Rights era than almost everything I had to memorize in school. It gives the feeling in the South of black child and that is something we often miss in the narrative. The snippets of her mother also relay a lot more about what was going on in that timeframe and what it was like, as opposed to the facts that we learn.