Life Doesn’t Frighten Me
A bold mashup of poetry and street art.
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me combines Maya Angelou’s vibrant poetry with the dark, edgy graffiti of Jean-Michel Basquiat. From fire-breathing dragons to tough guys fighting at night, the book weaves together challenges both imaginary and real. It toes the line between scary and exciting, while encouraging us to respond to the darkness of our world and minds with the empowering refrain, “Life doesn’t frighten me at all.”
As a kid, I was swept away by one of the last verses: “I’ve got a magic charm / That I keep up my sleeve / I can walk the ocean floor / And never have to breathe.” That magic charm felt like the key to all sorts of secret powers and made my imagination run wild. Apart from the exciting story, I loved that it gave me access to artists and writers that even adults enjoyed.
Life Doesn’t Frighten Me is adventurous, inspiring, and (just enough) grown-up.
