I enjoyed the 2025 picture book Awesome Earth: Concrete Poems Celebrate Caves, Canyons, and other Fascinating Landforms. Written by Joan Bransfield Graham and illustrated by Tania Garcia, Awesome Earth is, as the subtitle indicates, full of concrete poems: poem in the shape of the earth as a whole, continents, a mountain, a desert, an oasis, a volcano, a chasm, types of rocks, caves and their famous elements (stalactites and stalagmites), arches, an island and an archipelago, a peninsula, a glacier and a glacier lake, a plain, a plateau, a canyon, hills, valleys, hoodoos (really–see Bryce Canyon), a slice of earth that is really more of a wedge, revealing earth’s layers from crust to inner core, and, finally, the earth again, in a more reflective fashion.
The words in each concrete poem usually form the shapes of the geological feature…featured. So, the words for one arch goes up and over, and for another form an oval. The words for “chasm” are divided by a gap, and are shaped into rough columns, which are located on slabs of rock of similar color. Many of the poems rhyme, though to be fair, the shape and meaning trump the rhyme scheme. The rhyme does do a good job of providing words to emphasis when reading aloud, just as the shifts in letter size and case give kids something to trace with eyes and fingers.
I was confused by one aspect of the book: I can’t tell why the different geological formations are organized in the order they are. Some pairings make sense (valleys follow hills, for example), but others seem arbitrary and skip opportunities. For example, why follow the page on continents with the mountain poem? And why not mention that mountains are shaped by some of the forces that shape continents?
That aside, this is enjoyable, and is also a useful gateway book for teaching earth science.
