Review of the Day: Fourteen Ways of Looking at Jellyfish by Carole Boston Weatherford, ill. Bagram Ibatoulline

There was a point at which nonfiction and poetry melded completely, and I think we all missed it. It had been happening gradually for decades, of course. Heck, the Newbery Award winning poetry title Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman was a nature/verse mash-up. And if you want to go even further back, wasn’t the very first Caldecott winner (Animals of the Bible) science and poetry as well? Okay, that might be stretching it, but the fact remains that, for whatever reason, poetry and scientific inquiry go together swimmingly. Still, they’re usually penned by the same people, over and over. The poet that establishes early on their biological credentials is set for life when it comes to publications. In a way, it’s far more interesting when someone, long established as a great writer, tries their hand at it for the very first time. It’s not that Weatherford has never done science topics in any of her books before. She’s done floods, bats, and even the odd parakeet for fun. But there’s something different about Fourteen Ways of Looking at Jellyfish. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s been paired with the inimitable Bagram Ibatoulline. Maybe it’s the sheer array of facts on the pages (fourteen, naturally). Maybe it’s the tone. Whatever it is, this book is the apotheosis of the science/verse mash-up. Extraordinarily beautiful and more than a little wise, now you can convert your verse loving science haters and convert your science hating poetry-lovers, all in one fell swoop.

It kind of bugs me that I don’t know where this book came from, though. At the time of this review, we’re spoiled for context. Half the time, if I plug in an author’s name, the name of their latest book, and the word “interview” in a search engine, I’ll stumble on some kind of online content that answers all the questions I wanted to ask (and a couple I didn’t even think to come up with). Not so this book. I don’t know why Carole decided that focusing squarely on jellyfish, and doing so via the medium of poetry, was the way to go. I don’t know why Bagram Ibatoulline, an artist last seen illustrating the historical fiction picture book Runaway Pond by Nancy Graff, was drawn to the idea of spineless sea dwellers. Obviously if a book is particularly good, it defies explanation and context. Even so, it is also true that sometimes a book is SO good that it feels a crime not to know just a little bit more about its origin story.

Wherever it came from, it’s fun to watch Weatherford at work. Shall I confess something to you, though? I didn’t realize that this was a collection of poetry until I was more than halfway through. I can be forgiven for this. After all, poetry books that mix and meld science and verse are a devil for catalogers to work with. My particular copy had a 593.53 call number, placing it squarely in jellyfish, not poetry, territory in the library. In other places, folks might put it with the poetry instead. The poems themselves are free verse, by and large. One might preseume that Weatherford sees poetry as more of a useful conveyance system for facts than a vehicle for verse. Even so, I enjoyed watching the different lengths of poems at work. You won’t find mentions of haikus or acrostics at the book’s end (though there is a satisfying Bibliography of sources) but that’s all right. Weatherford’s talent here comes in seeking out all the best jelly facts out there. The box jellyfish’s toxic legacy. The way the Mitrocoma annae can potentially live forever. The fact that jellies exist “without a brain, heart, blood, or bones.” It’s as if she decided to put all the most interesting things about them into a single, solitary book for us to enjoy. The sole thing I didn’t see? The fact that sometimes octopuses catch rides on top of jellyfish. Ibatoulline would have had a field day with that one.

I mentioned before that Ibatoulline was last seen illustrating Runaway Pond, but that was a book very much already in his wheelhouse. Ibatoulline’s style is probably best described as “dreamlike realism”. He can do flights of fantasy, but they always feel very grounded in the real world. I’ve always likened him to P.J. Lynch in this way. Both men can create the fantastic out of the very ether if they want to, but at the same time you get the distinct impression that they know where every bone, tendon, and ligament lays in the characters they make up. Not many bones, tendons and ligaments in jellyfish, though. And maybe the creatures’ very flexibility was part of what gave Ibatoulliine the impetus to turn this into a different kind of book. We’re all very familiar with his style already. What happens when he decides to try something new? Maybe gets a little creative? In this book, the artist normally synonymous with with The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane utilizes a variety of different styes to best highlight jellies and the things they’re capable of.

And variegate those styles he does! The publication page says he used everything from watercolor and gouache to, “pen, pencil, colored paper, and digital tools.” Sounds… freeing, honestly. Like he had room to play around a bit. Like there wasn’t a requirement to make this feel like some lofty Ibatoulline project. Instead, he gets to experiment with silhouettes, Japanese prints, even comic book panels. Though his realism is without compare, it’s his more cartoonish pictures that caught my eye the most. There’s a poem called VII that discusses the life cycle of a jellyfish. Though he had a multitude of methods at his disposal, Ibatoulline opts to flatten everything with something that looks straight out of a picture book for the very young. A squid indicates on a piece of paper how a jellyfish grows and matures while schools of smiling fish look on. This got me to thinking about why he’d choose one style over another, depending on the poem. Perhaps he made this picture look younger to counteract the more scientific explaining going on in the poem (“The eggs meet sperm, producing larvae called planulae”). In other cases, like the comic book-stylings on poem XI, the poem is about the deadly box jellyfish, the fearsome nature of the poem working perfectly with art that reminds me not a little of the heyday of Chris Gall’s Dear Fish.

Face it. If you’re going to get wildly creative with a living creature in a book of verse and fact, the jellyfish is kind of the right creature to go with. Why? Because at the end of the day, and when all is said and done, those suckers are weeeeeeird. Poem II is basically just all the weirdest of the weirdos on a two-page spread, hanging out together. So here’s how we’re going to lure kids to this book. Do you have any alien-lovers? Okay, just show them these two pages and tell them that no matter how creative the human brain gets when making up aliens for books and TV shows and movies, nothing can possibly top what nature already figured out. Then read them that poem about the box jellyfish. THEN talk about the immortal on in that final poem. Finally, show them the art of this book. The gorgeous images. The silly ones. The downright peculiar ones. The fact of the matter is that Weatherford smashed poetry and science together and Ibatoulline then put his back into making it all writhe and undulate on the page. This. Book. Is. Fun. And quite frankly, we could use a little more fun with our nonfiction verse, wouldn’t you say? A book not to be missed.

On shelves now.

Source: Galley sent from publisher for review.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026