What Do You Know?

2021 — by Ariana Fields and Aracelis Girmay

"What Do You Know? is an introspective, poetic picture book about the acts of questioning and listening. Asked by Love itself, the questions wonder aloud, seeking the knowing of an array of very different, yet interconnected, entities and beings. Instead of pointing and naming, here the asker seeks to know the world by listening to it. Tell me, land, farmer, well, rock, fruit bat, courage––what do you know? Across these pages, children will wonder at what we can learn, when we open ourselves up to listening to the world.The book takes its form from lines of the Sharon Olds poem "Looking at Them Asleep." In WHAT DO YOU KNOW?, "love" is a subject, an asker of questions, who addresses a range of characters, some of them places and some of them people and ideas. And the characters speak back, weaving together a polyvocal and many-placed text that attempts to think about a range of places, "knowledges," and perspectives. We wanted to create a manuscript that would model play, imagining, and surprise within a formal constraint." -- publisher