Taylor Carr's Reviews > Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems

Mirror Mirror is a fun and quirky book of poems that literally flips stories on their heads to create clever twists on classic fairy tales. Creating a reverso poem involves taking a poem and flipping all of the lines from top to bottom. The only changes made are to punctuation and capitalization, and if done well, this leads to hilarious interpretations of these stories. Mirror Mirror takes on Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and many more stories with this unique twist. The result is that the stories are often told in two different perspectives. Sometimes this involves a prince that is sick and tired of all the rescuing, and sometimes the roles are completely reversed between characters. This is sure to put a smile on the face of anyone familiar with these tales. The reverso poem approach is also a very creative one. The inside cover of the book states that it "holds a cheeky mirror up to language and fairy tales, and renews the magic of both." The language component is really what makes this book so magical and could be part of a great lesson to language learners.

I'm sure students that are fans of poetry, especially in the upper elementary games, would love to be challenged to write their own reverso poems. The author, Marilyn Singer, shares her advice for writing reverso poems on this blog post: http://www.readbrightly.com/reverso-p...
"Find a story, subject, or character with two sides.
Start with a few lines that can be flipped so they make sense in reverse.
Select phrases that can be turned into questions and interjections.
Use a lot of participles, infinitives, and single word sentences.
The reversos have changes only in punctuation and capitalization, so get to know punctuation — how can you use a comma, period, dash, colon, semi-colon, etc.?
Write the poem on the computer so you can move the lines around until they make sense.
Don’t get discouraged — reversos are hard to write. Play and have fun!"