At first I was like this is not how I remember Yoshi’s House...but as it went on, invoking Super Mario World made all the poems have an extra edge and a real landscape. I forced myself to stay up to finish them all because it felt like both something I couldn’t put down and some of its power lies in being completed in one sitting. Like finishing a game when I had a full day to play it, it’s like a condescending version of that. Sexton and I are roughly the same age; we are, by the current definition, Millenials. This is the first collection I’ve read that captures something of being born around 1990, filtering life through cultural references, knowing that we live on a dying planet, and wondering what exactly we’ve been handed by earlier generations. Using Super Mario World as a jumping-off point allows Sexton to vividly explore the ways in which we’re indebted to pop-culture and how it defines not only our conversations, but our internal landscapes. He explores the expansiveness of video games, and the joy of escapism, as well as the ways in which it limits us.

Vanilla Secret 2 (flax and poppy and sloe berries reaching out of the frozen earth extending a frail hand as if to say I'm here it was lonely) My Granny and I spoke of the moon and the stars often. We spoke of birds, of life and of love. We laughed and cried together. Thank you Netgalley and Quarto Publishing Group (Frances Lincoln Childrens) for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. I used to snuggle up with my Granny, too. And she would tell me the most wonderful stories about her life and about Grandpa. And she drew beautiful birds, just like those featured in this book. If All the World Were... is a beautifully illustrated poem about a girl's relationship with her grandfather, encompassing both her joy as she spends time with him, and her sadness at his eventual passing.If all the world were memories, the past would be rooms I could visit and in each room would be my grandad.” If all the world were deep space, I’d orbit my granddad like the moon and our laughs would be shooting stars.” For starters, if trees disappeared overnight, so would much of the planet’s biodiversity. Habitat loss is already the primary driver of extinction worldwide, so the destruction of all remaining forests would be “catastrophic” for plants, animals, fungi and more, says Jayme Prevedello, an ecologist at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil. “There would be massive extinctions of all groups of organisms, both locally and globally.” I highly recommend this read for people of all ages as a reminder that even though we're all missing people, our memories of those who are gone help us to keep them alive in our hearts. The realities of death and loss are brought gradually to the reader’s attention, allowing their impact to be experience on many different levels, such as the loss of an imagined future, the loss of faith in the body, the loss a companion, the loss of a way of being, the loss of family. Sexton is very much in control of his work: he brings the reader with careful and exact patience to the heartbreak, so that we become part of the journey of loss. Super Mario World aids him in this: it allows the reader to share an internal landscape with the narrator of the poems, so that we we feel the grief as our own, so that when the narrator says, “this is the wrong universe among all the universes,” we are with him.

I would like it even more if author had written more on child’s emotion after the loss and also parents’ involvement with their kid helping her to put her thoughts and emotions into that diary. It seemed like granddad thought about it beforehand kid just understood the purpose of that. At points it feels like writing through all of the levels is done just for the sake of completionism... The collection runs in circles around ideas of memory and place and the reliability of both, and loss and haunting and escape and disreality, collecting ideas haphazardly, like so many golden coins – it builds its thesis and atmosphere by collage, gradually but not methodically. The same effect could be achieved with less meandering, and likely with more impact as a result. A touching and sensitive text that doesn’t dwell on the sadness. There are some lovely lines that are really memorable: ‘If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad’s birthdays so that he would never get old.’ The bright colours and wonderfully painterly illustrations are also lively and vivid.What really comes across is the honesty and emotion that he was clearly going through. How do you make sense of watching the world around you and all that you know crumble away? For him, losing himself every now and then in a fantasy world of a video game was the release he needed. It mixes the memories of different levels in the game - seeing the names appear and the challenges in each level made me smile with fondess! - alongside memories of his family and his mother. Life provides challenges of its' own and we are all competing in the video game of life - with hopefully no big bad beastie/boss at the end to have to defeat. The book is very colorful with kid’s imagination. I loved the way child poured out her sadness through a memory in a book preserving them for forever. It was great idea to help kids to cope with the loss of their loved ones. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.