What Do You Know?

Authors and sisters Girmay and Fields give voice to a variety of beings, imagining love itself asking, “What do you know?” and listening carefully to the response. The question is asked of a well, bees, and a forest, among other entities. “When love comes to the farmers and asks,/ What do you know,” one spread reads, a farmer responds: “I know work and weather/ and the hands of the sun and the rain.” In softly tinted art with the feel of sketchbook pages, a brown-skinned farmer carries heavy baskets across her shoulders. On another spread, laundry waves from lines strung between brick buildings, and a historian answers, “I know history speaks when we listen,/ for the quietest stories among the stories.” Fields draws as if setting down memories or dreams, with forms that repeat: people and birds with downcast gazes, bears with great claws, landscapes that undulate like ocean waves. Employing incantatory lines that conjure flame-like warmth and reverence, Girmay and Fields acknowledge the kind of knowing that’s older than books. Ages 7–up. [em](June) [/em]