Ellen Hopkins

Some of you might know who Ellen Hopkins is and for those of you who don't I figured I would try to enlighten you to the world of Ellen Hopkins. Ellen Hopkins is an award winning author. She wrote twenty books for children and about 7 young adult books so far. Now you may be wondering why even talk about her if she isn't a famous poet but in a way she is. The 7 young adult books that she wrote...they are written in verse. Her entire book is completely written in different forms of poetry. Each of her books are about 600 pages long but there naturally isn't that much written on each page. Poetry is usually vague and can have many meanings but Ellen Hopkins poetry novels are vague compared to a real novel and yet they capture you in a way a real novel is unable to do. Most of the poems are in free verse and some of them due to the spacing there will be a secret sentence. I'm going to leave an example if it below. While she writes she will leave one word in each stanza off by itself so that when you read those words it means something else. I couldn't find anything about why she writes her books in verse and she does write poetry. I have read some of her poetry but there is nothing better then the poetry in her books. The books are very intense. They all deal with very real topics and situations. They can be slightly depressing (according to my old roomate) but I find them captivating. I love to read and I love poetry and when I found these books I couldn't put them down. I highly recomend looking into at least one of her books. It will give you a good insight into a differnt kind of poetry that not many people are able to do. I myself only know of Ellen as someone who writes books in poetry form but who knows maybe it will become the "cool new thing". In case you are interested her books are: Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass (which is a sequal to Crank), Identical, Tricks and Fallout (which is her newest book and is the third and final book for Crank and Glass). I have them all and am completely addicted so if you have any questions about them or just morbid curiousity about what the books are generally about to figure out which one you might want to read feel free to just ask me! Here is an excerpt from her newest book Fallout just to give you a taste of her style:
SO YOU WANT TO KNOW
All about her. Who
she
really is.(Was?) Why
she swerved off
the high road. Hard
left
to nowhere,
recklessly
indifferent to
me,
Hunter Seth Haskins,
her firstborn
son. I've been
choking
that down for
nineteen years.
Why did she go
on
her mindless way,
leaving me spinning
in a whirlwind of
her dust?