“It will never leave us
It flows in our society like a never ending river,
It beats people down slowly
And appears through the cracks in the sidewalk”

Paint Me Like I Am is book filled with poems written by teens who gone through or experienced, depression, stress, love, racism, fear, away from home, being abused at home, and worried about the color of their skin. I was very sceptical about reading this book, because i'm not a huge fan of reading poems until a very bright yellow book caught my eye. After the first few poems, i was just hooked onto reading even more. There were some times where it was pretty challenging to even put the book down. I guess you could say i fell in love with this book due to the fact that i was able to connect to most of these poems.

One of my favorite poems from the book was called RACE and there were two main reasons why i this poem was my personal favorite, because 1) The poem was connected to my unit in class which was a perfect poem to talk about during class and 2) The quote from the beginning came from the book, it gave me the chills after reading that. Gemma Mirkensen states “We can try to hide it. To convince ourselves that it has disappeared, but in reality Race is immortal.” This gave me even more of an urge to read the book. I just love it when you're hooked too something you're hooked for a long time or maybe even never.

  I would like to say thank you to Ms. Giovanni for gathering all of these poems and showing me that i'm not the only one going through events or/and experiences. If you're a fan of poems, new to poems, or just a teen like me who saw a very colorful book and thought it was gonna be a boring book of poems but sooner thought i was wrong and kept me reading, i am happy to say that Paint Me Like I Am is a book you won’t put down for awhile.