Kids after some highbrow ha-ha’s will find them here.
A light poetic survey of the animal kingdom and then some.
Posing the question, “If I weren’t a human, / what else could I be?” Evans playfully answers with possibilities ranging from the “one-celled amoeba” and exotic narwhal to the fanciful jackalope, unicorn, even a vampire. As he curates his menagerie, Evans takes occasion to employ a variety of poetic forms in portraying both the common and the unusual, with mixed results—going so far at one point as to both use and invoke the ghazal form to describe the gazelle: “I’d live like a poem, headlong and heartstrong, / and wear a ghazal, if I were a gazelle.” Throughout, Pope’s bold, directly expressive pen-and-ink illustrations amplify Evans’ wry message, as in “If I Were a Hippo,” where Pope underscores Evans’ apt depiction with a sketch of a hippo holding a wee umbrella that barely shields its eyes. Evans’ humor, while silly and offbeat, often relies on rather refined wordplay (“If I were a polar bear, / … / I’d go with the floe”) or, as in the case of the albatross, on sophisticated literary and cultural allusions: “Of course I’d be cross / if I were an albatross! / What did I do? What the heck? / Why hang me around your neck?”
Kids after some highbrow ha-ha’s will find them here. (Poetry. 8-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945268-09-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Plum Street Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fresh off his engaging Guyku: A Year of Haiku for Boys (illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds, 2010) and inspired by the work of Andrew Russ, Raczka continues to dabble in short lyric forms, here experimenting with images conjured up by breaking down a single word. The smaller components that comprise the subsequent free-verse poem read left to right, cascading down the page while maintaining the same horizontal letter positions as in the original word. For example, “vacation” yields “ac tion / i n / a / va n,” alongside Doniger’s spare three-color drawing of a family and a rabbit traveling through the countryside in a van with a canoe on the roof. For readers who find the spatiality of the lettering a challenge for comprehension, Raczka sets the poem in more standard format, “vacation / action / in / a / van,” on the following page. While these 22 poems are uniformly clever, some, like “earthworms”—“a / short / storm / worms / here / worms / there / wear / shoes”—are more successful than others, such as “flowers”—“we slow / for / free / wows”—both in their playfulness and in evoking the suggestive depths of language. Fun as a prompt for poetic exploration but less fulfilling as a stand-alone volume. (Poetry. 8-12)
Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59643-541-4
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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