Love to Langston. (chidren's bookshelf).

Love to Langston by Tony Medina, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie Lee & Low Books, January 2002, $16.95 ISBN 1-584-30041-8, ages 9 to 12

Poet and author Tony Medina pays homage to one of America's literary geniuses, Langston Hughes, whose colorful and rhythmic poetry inspired him as a young boy. Love to Langston is a brilliant collection of politically stirring and deeply moving poems about a young Langston, illustrated with rich somewhat crude-looking images that tell how one young boy turned his childhood blues into artistic inspiration.

The poems artfully take young readers on a journey through the horrors of slavery beginning with "Grandma's Stories," followed by "Jim Crow Row," a hard hitting piece that expresses 7th-grade Langston's hurt, disillusionment and intolerance of his segregated classroom.

Initially intense and somber, the book assumes a lighter tone with poems like "Libraries," which reveals young Langston's penchant for getting lost in books and beautiful words to ease his sense of alienation. Towards the end of the book, works such as "Harlem Is the Capital of My World" depict a much more confident and self-empowered young man who embraces his community, his people, and revels in his African-American culture.

Medina succeeds in introducing children to the Harlem Renaissance poet in 37 easy-to-read pages of poetry. He lovingly extends to African-American children a work that mirrors their own experiences, tells their family's history and demonstrates that even in the midst of troubling times, they too can find ways to express and ease their pain. Or as Langston writes in "Sometimes Life Ain't Always a Hoot": "You can sit and sulk/suck your teeth and sigh, or love and laugh/and live life by and by."

--Althea Lenore Honegan is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, New York.