There’s a classic poem by Wallace Stevens titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It is an austere, imagist poem, and highly influential in the field.
When I saw the title of this 2026 picture book written by Carole Boston Weatherford, Fourteen Ways of Looking at Jellyfish, I wondered first if this was an homage to the poem, and second, if so, how closely the book would follow the poem.
The answer is yes, it is a nod to this famous poem, but the book does not follow the poem very closely. It uses the distinct views, and some elements of form, like numbering the sections in Roman numerals: I, II, etc. However, the poem emphasizes images and language, sometimes to the point of baffling or excluding many readers. (For example, who or what are the “bawds of euphony”?)
This book, by contrast, welcomes everyone: kids, adults, the artistic, and the scientific. It begins, like the poem, with a three-line stanza/section, but the words are accompanied by rich, haunting images by Bagram Ibatoulline showing jellyfish floating in the water. Where the poem accented the blackbird’s eye, the book foregrounds a gazing child.
In later sections, the text varies considerably more than the poem does. II, for example, is a single line, and then colorful drawings of 14 very different jellyfish. III is longer, and almost prose–and, since it is about the past, the images are of the past, communicated in part through two pages of sepia.
Styles of both text and image vary throughout, offering variety to match that of the jellyfish…and several roads into their world. There’s both more cultural variation and more emotional range in the book than the poem, and some pages will haunt.
An ambitious and impressive book.
