Jordan Scott

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Winner What if words got stuck in the back of your mouth whenever you tried to speak? What if they never came out the way you wanted them to? Sometimes it takes a change of perspective to get the words flowing. A New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year I wake up each morning with the sounds of words all around me. And I can't say them all . . . When a boy who stutters feels isolated, alone, and incapable of communicating in the way he'd like, it takes a kindly father and a walk by the river to help him find his voice. Compassionate parents everywhere will instantly recognize a father's ability to reconnect a child with the world around him. Poet Jordan Scott writes movingly in this powerful and ultimately uplifting book, based on his own experience, and masterfully illustrated by Greenaway Medalist Sydney Smith. A book for any child who feels lost, lonely, or unable to fit in. Finalist for the BC and Yukon Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize An American Library Association Notable Children’s Book ILA Primary Fiction Honoree Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Awareness, Bookpage, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Publishers Lunch, and more! A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection A Bank Street Best Childrens Book of the Year! A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year A CBC Best Picture Book of the Year A Kids' Book Choice Award Finalist

I Talk Like a River

Sydney Smith

My Baba's Garden

Eu Falo Como Um Rio

Stephen Collis

In the summer of 2009, poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott traveled to five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia, leaving a single copy of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species to decay for a year in each remote outdoor location. A year later the texts were retrieved, photographed and documented, and worked into Decomp, an extended photo-essay and prose poem. The poets allowed nature to make 'selections' from Darwin'stext, via decomposition. Each distinct ecosystem offered a different 'reading' of (and through) the rotting book's pages. As evolution works, in Timothy Morton's words, ''through constant rewritings of the DNA sequence,' so the poets found themselves faced with a constantly rewritten Darwin. The final text is 'made up of all kinds of viral code insertions so you can't tell which bit is original.' Through colourful photo reproductions and prose meditations on their found texts, Collis and Scott have produced a work that moves beyond the typical dualisms of nature and writing -- dualisms still active in Darwin's own book.

Decomp

The bright, taut, explosive poems in Jordan Scott's Blert represent a spelunk into the mouth of the stutterer. Through the unique symptoms of the stutter (Scott, like fifty million others, has always stuttered), language becomes a rolling gait of words hidden within words, leading to different rhythms and textures, all addressed by the mouth's slight erosions. In Scott's lexicon, to blert is to stutter, to disturb the breath of speaking. The stutter quivers in all that we do, from a skip on a CD to a slip of the tongue. These experiences are often dismissed as aberrant, but in Blert, such fragmented milliseconds are embraced and mined as language. Often aimed full-bore at words that are especially difficult for the stutterer, Scott's poems don't just discuss, they replicate the act of stuttering, the "blort, jam, and rejoice" involved in grappling with the granular texture of words.

Jordan Scott

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