Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices

Paul Fleischman builds this collection around a genuinely unusual form: fourteen poems about insects, meant to be read aloud by two voices at once, with lines split across two columns on the page that sometimes alternate between speakers and sometimes land together in unison. The subjects range across the insect world, mayflies living out an entire adult life in a single day, chittering book lice, honeybees communicating through dance, and each poem uses its two voice structure to mimic something about how the insect itself moves or sounds, overlapping chirps, alternating buzzes, a call and response between a queen and her hive. Read by two people who commit to the timing, the poems become something closer to a small performance piece than a page of verse sitting still on paper.

The collection asks more of a reader than most poetry written for children, not in vocabulary but in attention: getting the rhythm right between two readers takes a rehearsal or two, and the payoff is a genuinely different experience than reading any of it silently and alone. Younger children enjoy the insect facts and the playful sound of the language even without a partner to read with; older readers and the classrooms that use it as a performance exercise get the fuller effect the form was built for. It is short, sixty four pages, and works equally well as a one time read or as a piece revisited and reperformed the way sheet music gets replayed.

Fleischman had already been experimenting with the two voice form before this book, and its combination of natural history and structural invention has made it a staple of school poetry units built around reading aloud rather than reading silently.