Twenty-two playful poems introduce geology in a way that’s sure to have older kids digging for more. Peters claims “a life-long obsession” with dirt, mountains, and fossils, and transmits her enthusiasm into each small gem, e.g., “Alaskan Stream”: “Gleaming strands of icy meltwater / braided by Denali’s fingers.” Detailed endnotes explain that “Denali” is the Athabaskan word for the Alaskan mountain we call Mount McKinley, whose glacial streams carry so much sediment that they end up splitting and rejoining, or braiding. Felstead’s energetic collages of maps, tiny photocopied figures, colored pencil, and paint marvelously evocate action and mood. In “Recipe for Granite,” South America sits on a food scale, while a planet is rinsed in a colander, and hand-drawn marks extend the scale on a thermometer to one million degrees. First-rate, this could be used in the classroom for the next ten thousand years. (Poetry/nonfiction. 5-12)
