It's raining pigs & noodles: Poems

The poet laureate of the young set is back, with his artist laureate collaborator, to "take another swipe at stuffiness."- Here are more than one hundred poems bursting to be read, chanted, laughed over, and remembered.

It would be hard to find a schoolage kid who has not read or heard a Prelutsky poem and who does not want to hear another. He plays with the language and encourages readers to revel in the game. Puns, jokes, wordplay and shape play, wit, silliness, slapstick, and joy abound. Some of the poems are about people, some are about animals. And some are about things that never were (and that one hopes never will be). Be warned: Read a poem once and you will love it. Read it several times and it will be part of you forever.

National Parenting Publication-Gold Award

Brace yourself for more pun-ishment from the playful Jack Prelutsky and illustrator James Stevenson, creators of The New Kid on the Block, Something Big Has Been Here, and A Pizza the Size of the Sun. More than 100 Prelutsky poems populate the pages--a mix of 8-year-old-boy humor, nonsense poetry in the tradition of Ogden Nash and Edward Lear, and clever, often unabashedly shameless, wordplay. While there are many, many doozies, our favorite is "Hiccup!," excerpted here:

I've tried gulping hiccup water,
stood upon my hiccup head,
held my breath until my hiccup
hiccup face turned hiccup red.

Chronic cogitators are celebrated in "Quibble Q. Quing" (who thinks about things), and wild imaginations in "Purple Orangutans:" ("Rabbits and parrots play tag in the stars, / marshmallows march in the meadows of Mars... / these are a few of the wonders I find / in the magic museum I keep in my mind.") Children find a kindred spirit in Prelutsky, a poet who knows full well that overweight underdogs and chocolate-covered salami and Sniffing Snutterwudds are always worth a giggle. Stevenson's understated (but always expressive) line drawings suit this silly collection to a T. (Perfect for reading aloud to younger readers, but wordsmiths ages 9 and older will pick up all the puns.) --Karin Snelson