Ariana Fields is a graduate of SFAI (printmaking) and the City
College Masters of Landscape Architecture program. She is
interested in visual modes of storytelling, representations of
movement, and works on paper. When she is not building, gardening,
or drawing, she is making shapes with her body skating and
surfing.
Aracelis Girmay is a mother, auntie, teacher, and writer.
Originally from Southern California, where the names of streets
like Orange, Cherry, Bristol, Laurel, Buffalo, Santa Clara, Lime
were a kind of poetry, she now lives and reads with her family in
Brooklyn, New York.
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... In softly tinted art with
the feel of sketchbook pages, … 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.
*Publishers Weekly*
“[In] this lyrical exploration of the world, … the musings are
philosophical, ecological, poetic, and even sociological in nature…
Many of these spreads let Mother Nature take the focus; humans
(most are Black or brown skinned) are part of the land, not
creatures who lord over it. Things even take a cosmological turn
when readers hear from the Seven Sisters, who know ‘the language of
light.’ Both text and art seem intentionally open-ended, leaving
space for readers to extend meaning in their own ways, making it a
fitting writing prompt for students (of all ages). Slightly muted,
earth-toned illustrations feature flowing lines—from the
multicolored furrows of a farmer’s plowed field to the rays of
light in a starry night sky—that compel page turns. A
contemplative, enigmatic exploration of life on planet Earth.”
*Kirkus Reviews*
“Author Aracelis Girmay and illustrator Ariana Fields, who are
sisters, have created a sweeping, complex and mysterious vision of
love in the picture book What Do You Know? Here, love is the
protagonist who, in poetic and enigmatic text, wanders about asking
questions of people, animals and even rocks... With soft lines and
smudged colors, Ms. Fields’s pictures have a dreamlike
quality...What Do You Know? is an indirect mechanism for delivering
love to readers ages 5-8, but with its varied scenes and
characters, it fosters a sense of the wondrous width of the world
and the connections between seemingly disparate things in it.”
*Wall Street Journal*
All love is an outstretched hand of curiosity reaching for
knowledge—a tender acknowledgement of a reality that is not
yourself and a lively interest in its interiority… That is what
poet Aracelis Girmay and her artist sister Ariana Fields explore in
What Do You Know? … Page by page, love comes to the farmer and the
seafarer, to the fruit bats and the honeybees, to the forest and
the stars, asking each what they know, and their answers come
simple and profound like a child’s question… What emerges is a
glowing sense that love is not something we do but something we
are, something the world is, something vaster than space and older
than time.
*The Marginalian*
“Created by two sisters, this picture book… celebrates the wild
diversity of life on earth but also the connection to wonder and
mystery around us. The book is simple yet deeply profound, offering
hope in darkness, the breath of whales and bears, and the
magnificence of change even if it takes millennia. Happily, the
writing doesn’t rhyme, instead held together by the question and
answer format. The writing is gentle and responsive, allowing each
scenario to stand unique but also part of the whole. The art is
bold and simple. It moves from layers of earth in the fields to
lava flowing across the land to the immense eye of a whale at sea.
It invites us to see the beauty in laundry on an urban line, the
marvel of goats on cliffs, and the profound black of a starlit
night. Gorgeous, deep and full of marvels.”
*Waking Brain Cells*
“This is a truly beautiful picture book with text based on the last
line of Sharon Olds amazing and haunting poem ‘Looking at Them
Asleep.’ ‘When love comes to me and says What do you know, I say
This girl, this boy.’ In What Do You Know?, Love comes to a honey
bee, a farmer, a historian, volcanic ash, a rock and more, and asks
the question. Each person or object gives a thoughtful and honest
answer giving the reader a mini-lesson in patience, guidance,
understanding, balance and joy.”
*Youth Services Book Review*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
