Take Me To Your Leader!

Sylvia Pantaleo is an associate professor of education, specializing in
children’s literature, at the University of Victoria. She is the
co-author of Learning with Literature in the Canadian Elementary
Classroom.

This collection of poems about extraterrestrials is divided into four
sections: “Silly Season,” “Aliens in the Freezer,” “Angel
Hair,” and “Black Helicopters.” Stevenson’s topics include alien
visitors, spaceships, alien abductions, wormholes, crop circles, alien
implants, and government conspiracy. Featured creatures include Mothman,
manimals, an amphibious bipedal guy, transient space hunters,
Hopkinsville Goblins, and the Flatwoods Monster. The book’s themes
seem to originate from X-file reports, UFO investigations, and tabloid
headlines.

Some poems communicate skepticism about the existence of aliens, others
present aliens as friendly and non-threatening creatures, and still
others convey caution, concern, and even a degree of paranoia about
extraterrestrial beings. Stevenson writes his poems from the points of
view of various alien creatures and human beings. He also includes
several intertextual connections to cultural artefacts (e.g., song
parodies), events, and people in the selections.

The poems vary in their rhyming patterns and verse lengths. All are
written in accentual-syllabic meter and generally do not include the use
of figurative expression. Overall the poems are entertaining, and many
of the selections seem to challenge our thinking about aliens (although
some readers may be troubled by Stevenson’s alternative theories of
the evolution of the human race). Anderson’s black line drawings
nicely complement the sentiment of the poems they accompany.
Recommended.