Young readers accompany a young girl on a journey into the marvelous realms of imagination and possibility when she is asked "What do you want to be?" in a unique poetical fantasy complemented with vibrant and beautiful illustrations. Reprint.

I Want to Be (Picture Puffins)

Children's Books

Moss, Thylias

Literature & Fiction

Puffin

Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress

Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . .
With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir.
It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life.
Yet ultimately, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

William Morrow Paperbacks

Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . .
With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir.
It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life.
Yet ultimately, TALE OF A SKY-BLUE DRESS is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

William Morrow

What do you want to be? a young girl is asked. Her answer is full of the soaring imagination and daring of youth: I want to be in motion but I want the ants in my pants to sometimes take a vacation. Sometimes I want to be slow but not so slow that everything passes me by. Poet Thylias Moss's extraordinary images are brought to life with Jerry Pinkney's equally extraordinary illustrations.  Exhilirating, verbally and visually; the very essence of youthful energy and summertime freedom.  --Kirkus Reviews

Demco Media

After some thought a young girl describes in poetic terms the kind of person she wants to be

I Want to Be

Dial

Although many of Moss’s poems discuss race and gender, these subjects are, explains scholar Langdon Hammer, simply "starting points for her work…her poetry makes such facts of identity seem unfamiliar, their meanings not to be predicted, unavailable to the naked eye." Known for startling metaphors and vivid imagery, Moss’s work demonstrates an expansive imagination that seeks to connect at times wildly disparate subjects.

Pyramid of Bone (Callaloo Poetry Series, 8)

Poetry

University of Virginia Press

Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (American Poetry Series)

Ecco Press

Thylias Moss (b. 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright, of African American, Indian, and European heritage, who has published a number of poetry collections, children's books, essays, and multimedia work she calls poam s, products of acts of making, related to her work in Limited Fork Theory. Among her awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Artist's Fellowship from the Massachusetts Arts Council, an NEA grant, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize Witter Bynner award for poetry. This was her fifth book of poetry. Limited Fork Theory is the study of interacting systems. Each tine of a limited fork also functions as a root and/or a branch and may curve, circle, disappear for a while, temporarily connecting things, possibly even snagging something tasty, something possibly nourishing, something that can be ingested --maybe without harm(ing us), but what is ingested will change during this process, and we may change, so the temporary connections is also a means of exchange: we give something and we receive something;  we may not realize immediately that we are different, but we are. Moss is a visionary storyteller, a political and religious poet. It's the world of 'marvelous thirsts' and 'glorious hungers', to use her words. She knows that language is both the individual and the community. She has a sense of history, the complexity and variety of Black experience in America. What drama, humor, imagination, intelligence, and range of subject matter these poems have. Thylias Moss is a major figure in contemporary American poetry. Thylias Moss names the black truths behind white lies. These poems are angry, defiant, yet informed with a sense of the sacred in their images, in their language, in their mimesis of transcendent ritual in everyday life. Here is a writer who speaks bitterness and makes her own music of it.

Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (The American Poetry)

Ecco Pr

Poems deal with children, envy, parenthood, tornados, the South, animals, machines, poetry, racism, and mortality

Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky: Poems

Persea

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moss, Thylias. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moss, Thylias

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moss, Thylias. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

I Want to Be (Picture Puffins)

Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress

Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress

I Want to Be (Picture Puffins)

I Want to Be

I Want to Be

Pyramid of Bone (Callaloo Poetry Series, 8)

Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (American Poetry Series)

Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (The American Poetry)

Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky: Poems