Cast Away

“How much have you thrown away in your lifetime already? Do you ever think about it? Where does this plethora of leavings come from? How long does it take you, even one little you, to fill the can by your desk?”—Naomi Shihab Nye



National Book Award finalist and devoted trash-picker-upper Naomi Shihab Nye explores these questions and more in her original poetry collection Cast Away. “I couldn’t save the world, but I could pick up trash,” she says in her introduction to this stunning collection. With poems about food wrappers, lost mittens, plastic straws, refugee children, trashy talk, the environment, connection, community, responsibility to the planet, politics, immigration, time, junk mail, trash collectors, garbage trucks, all that we carry and all that we discard, this is a rich, engaging, moving, and sometimes humorous collection for readers ages twelve to adult.