Alphabet book

An alphabet book is a book primarily designed for young children. It presents letters of the alphabet with corresponding words and/or images. Some alphabet books feature capitals and lower case letter forms, keywords beginning with specific letters, or illustrations of keywords. Alphabet books may consist of sentences, paragraphs, or entire pages highlighting letters and corresponding keywords in a variety of creative and imaginative formats.

Purposes

Alphabet books introduce the sounds and letters of the ordered alphabet. These books provide a non-threatening genre in which children engage in a variety of both fiction and non-fiction texts. Alphabet books provide opportunities for:

Alphabet (book)

Alphabet is one of the most well-known poems of Inger Christensen, who was broadly considered to be Denmark's most prominent poet. The poem was originally published in 1981 in Danish as alfabet. An English language translation by Susanna Nied won the American-Scandinavian PEN Translation Prize in 1982.

Structure

Alphabet is a systematic poem, in which each of the fourteen sections of the poem is tied to a letter of the alphabet and the number of lines found in each section is dictated by the Fibonacci sequence. (The first section, "A", has one line. The last section, "N", has 600.)

Themes

Alphabet deals with themes of nuclear war and ecological devastation.

As the poem progresses and each section lengthens, an increasing number of elements related to destruction, death, and ecological devastation are introduced.

Reception

The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly in 2001: "As used here with controlled repetitions, the [Fibonacci] sequence gives the whole an almost medieval sense of restriction[.] Abstracted cold war fears and post-'70s ecological concern and alienation give way to litanies of real world outrages ... which culminate in a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare, with birds and children somehow having survived in caves. The scenario may seem dated, but the threats remain very real, and Christensen's poetic appeal for sanity and humanity remains an abstracted call to action."