15 pages • 30 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeThe Rider
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Blood” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
“Blood,” published in Nye’s collection Words Under the Words: Selected Poems is an important meditation on what it means to be Arab American during a time of war. In the poem, the speaker tries to reconcile their American upbringing with being half-Arab. It is very different in form and subject from “The Rider.”
“The End of Exile” by Solmaz Sharif (2018)
Solmaz Sharif is an Iranian American contemporary poet. Like Nye, Sharif writes of a lost Middle Eastern homeland. “The End of Exile” speaks to what it feels like to leave behind a part of oneself (a city, a homeland) and try to continue living, despite this wound. As shown in “Blood,” Nye feels a similar wound living as a multiracial individual in America.
“Bees Were Better” by Naomi Shihab Nye (2008)
In “Bees Were Better,” bees inspire the speaker in a way that the boy and his story did in “The Rider.”
Further Literary Resources
“Naomi Shihab Nye” Dodge Poetry Festival Reading (2008)
In this short video, Naomi Shihab Nye reads four poems: “Please Describe How You Became a Writer,” “Fresh,” “During a War,” and “Truth Serum.” While brief, this reading gives character and voice to Nye’s poems so a reader can better understand Nye’s meaning and inflection.
Naomi Shihab Nye Interview with On Being (2016)
Originally aired in 2016, this lengthy interview recording with the On Being podcast gives an important glimpse into Nye’s feelings surrounding the importance of poetry, writing as a way of coping, and of how writing allows one to better understand who they are as a human.
“Trash has long been treasure for poet Naomi Shihab Nye” The Washington Post (2020)
In this recent article, The Washington Post profiles Nye and her collection of poems for kids, Cast Away (2020) about how discarded objects have their own odd beauty. Nye, who served as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2019-2021, crafted the collection with the aim of making readers stop and think about often unconsidered items.
Listen to Poem
In this reading and multimedia performance of “The Rider,” an actor reads the poem while a character acts out the poem’s movements.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
