It’s simply one of the most beautiful children’s picture books I’ve seen about how to remember a grandparent. No, scratch that. I mean scratch the qualifier. It’s just one of the loveliest children’s picture books, full stop. A touching and sensitive text that doesn’t dwell on the sadness. There are some lovely lines that are really memorable: ‘If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad’s birthdays so that he would never get old.’ The bright colours and wonderfully painterly illustrations are also lively and vivid. I found this to be a stunning piece of work. I wondered how mixing the world of Super Mario World with grieving would work, but somehow it just does! It had me smiling at the memories it created in my mind about playing Super Mario World and the escapism that the game offered, and had me crushed by his descriptions of watching someone he loves be so ill and dealing with loss and grief. The explosive yield of a nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The W-87 warhead carried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of 300 kilotons. The B83 nuclear freefall bomb, carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons. I would like it even more if author had written more on child’s emotion after the loss and also parents’ involvement with their kid helping her to put her thoughts and emotions into that diary. It seemed like granddad thought about it beforehand kid just understood the purpose of that.

As the child of a cancer survivor, this book definitely hit home a lot more than I thought it would, but damn did I love it. The poems, read after each other in one sitting, tell the story of a man grieving his mother in one of the most expressive mediums out there. It’s a wonderful way of showing how the loss of his mother affected him through poetry, but also by using the images from his childhood love. It puts the way people grieve into a new perspective and makes you think about the way that you yourself might experience loss. At first I was like this is not how I remember Yoshi’s House...but as it went on, invoking Super Mario World made all the poems have an extra edge and a real landscape. I forced myself to stay up to finish them all because it felt like both something I couldn’t put down and some of its power lies in being completed in one sitting. Like finishing a game when I had a full day to play it, it’s like a condescending version of that.At points it feels like writing through all of the levels is done just for the sake of completionism... The collection runs in circles around ideas of memory and place and the reliability of both, and loss and haunting and escape and disreality, collecting ideas haphazardly, like so many golden coins – it builds its thesis and atmosphere by collage, gradually but not methodically. The same effect could be achieved with less meandering, and likely with more impact as a result. If all the world were dreams, I would mix my bright Grandad feelings and paint them over sad places." While it took me a while to grasp the way that Sexton writes, I was soon completely enamoured and hooked by his writing and sped through the whole of the book on a short one-hour flight from Glasgow to London. The poems within the book each take their title from a different world or setting within the Super Mario Universe such as Yoshi’s Island. Each poem takes us through the journey of Sexton growing up and delving into the world of video games as a way of escaping the illness that is taking his mother’s body.

I love the concept of this book and it sometimes lives up to its premise, but overall it fell a bit short for me. The poet weaves together his childhood experiences of playing Super Mario World with those of dealing with his mother's illness and eventual death. When the book works, you can real feel how the imagery of the game is bleeding into reality and the reality is influencing the child's understanding of the game. What a wonderful idea and what a wonderful book! A young child shows us what it’s like going through the seasons with Granddad. a v v interesting one ! I like this a lot I think Stephen is very talented I was actually reminded of Riviere's Kim Kardashian's Marriage a fair bit though I would say Sexton doesn't commit to the bit to quite the same level. Strong Ashbery influence here which was fantastic and one of the clearest I've found it in a poet of the brit isles besides people like Mark and Oli where again that's another route. If all the world were deep space, I’d orbit my granddad like the moon and our laughs would be shooting stars.”

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His work has poetry and performance at its heart, drawing on over 16 years' experience running dynamic creative literacy sessions in schools. He aims to inspire young people through stories and characters they can recognise. Sexton mixes a more conventional poetic vocabulary with a specialist one: medical terms, modern brand names and vernacular speech all seep into even his most flowery, descriptive poems. The combined effect is often gorgeous. Taken from ‘Yoshi’s Island 4’: The rhinoceroses dodder like a basso obstinato / in the valleys between mountains in their scooped-out eroded cirques. / If there is magic in their horns they seem indifferent to it / trudging along instead upon the khaki-coloured mountain path. / I want to call them dinosaurs but that’s not even kind of close: / those hundreds of millions of years that supercontinent makes break. / In Queensland there was that fossil showing a dinosaur stampede: / hundreds of sharp little talons but no sign of what had spooked them. / Thousands and thousands and thousands of lifetimes ago / these glyphs are all they’ve left behind. One clear night not so long ago / we all stood out in the garden wondering up at the comet / whose memory is very long who we hope still remembers us.” Apart from one rough pantoum (“Choco-Ghost House”), I didn’t notice any other forms being used. This is free verse; internally unpunctuated, it has a run-on feel. While I do think readers are likely to get more out of the poems if they have some familiarity with Super Mario World and/or are gamers themselves, this is a striking book that examines bereavement in a new way. What if humanity mined every bit of uranium from Earth—approximately 35 million tons? Well, that’s enough to build ten billion Hiroshima bombs. Detonating all of these bombs would be an extinction-level event on par with the asteroid that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. Except this time, it would be the end of the Age of the Humans.

and now I think I / remember what I mean to say which is only that once / when all the world and love was young I saw it beautiful glowing / once in the corner of the room once I was sitting in its light”Without trees, formerly forested areas would become drier and more prone to extreme droughts. When rain did come, flooding would be disastrous. Massive erosion would impact oceans, smothering coral reefs and other marine habitats. Islands stripped of trees would lose their barriers to the ocean, and many would be washed away. “Removing trees means losing huge amounts of land to the ocean,” says Thomas Crowther, a global systems ecologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the 2015 Nature study. These are the days of no letters her signature starved with jitters / in the few half hours she’s awake to make arrangements: no flowers / or no more than is natural for a swift discreet funeral / and burial with her parents tea and sandwiches afterwards. / She sleeps the undertaker leaves the fountain leaks in the courtyard. / My head is heavier than stone. I read yesterday’s newspapers / not either asleep or awake let me please die is what she says. / It’s me I’m here is what I say but I am not since she is not. / Then she says I want to go home once more for one once more one night / and I say you can’t go home now she says I know not now after.” Allison Colpoys is an award-winning freelance book designer and illustrator. Her books include The Underwater Fancy Dress Parade and Under the Love Umbrella. If All the World is her first book for Frances Lincoln Children's Books. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Too often though, I didn't really see much of the game being reflected in the poems or get any sense of why specific elements of the game were important to the author. Having a poem dedicated to each level just seems to push the concept too far. From my own experience, particular games really do summon up strong memories and emotions from the time when I originally played them, but that doesn't mean that every single level holds a rich vein of meaning.

If all the world were springtime, I would replant my grandad's birthdays so that he would never get old." I really loved this collection. I read a review which intrigued me because the book is about the poet's memories of the years when as a teenager he played Super Mario World whilst his mother was going through treatment for cancer. It's dense, allusive, it sounds beautiful, and it demands reading and re-reading. I can see it would not be every person's cup of tea, but I found it very beautiful and heartbreaking. Lines like “to suffer suffer everywhere and not a moment stop to think” make me stop reading mid-poem. Idk if it’s because they seem desperate to reach for something deep, or because they read like they were written in 5 seconds and not touched by an editor. “I will have missed you for so long I will have / missed you” is so painfully earnest it just rings false. It isn’t convincing. And I think it knows it isn’t convincing, isn’t fully communicating the depth of the author’s grief, and so it overcompensates, but this only makes its incredibility further amplified. In this book, the little girl keeps the memory of her grandpa alive through writing and drawing. This is such an important but beautiful message. Like the little girl, I imagine all the promises of adventure that my Granny and I planned. And that is what you call living memory. Sometimes we can't keep the people we love alive forever, but we keep them forever alive in our hearts. A wonderful collection of poems that guide the reader through Super Mario World while also navigating the grief and stress of losing someone you love. The poems are whimsical, beautiful, haunting, and often highly technical. 'Top Secret Area' is a new favourite.Every poem in this book is a marvel. Taken all together they make up a work of almost miraculous depth and beauty' Sally Rooney This is such a sweet gentle book about all the memories the little girl has of her grandfather, throughout the year, and how much she loved him, and how sad she is that she can not have those walks with him. The whole collection is tightly tied to one idea: the death of Stephen Sexton’s mother, framed by his obsession with Super Mario World. And that idea works. It works incredibly well, somehow never feeling repetitive.