Publications about books for children and young adults
In honor of National Poetry Month, we’ve compiled a list of poetry books for a wide range of ages, all recently published and recommended by The Horn Book Magazine. There’s something for everyone: anthologies and verse narratives; silly poetry and serious poetry; love poems and lullabies; free verse, formal verse, and brand-new verse forms. What [...]
*from The House at Pooh Corner Poetry can be used to examine and celebrate the world we live in and the worlds we invent. A great way to observe National Poetry Month is to share the following exemplary poetry books for young children featuring the calming rhythms of lullaby, the humorous juxtaposition of portmanteaux, the [...]
Follow Follow: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer; illus. by Josée Masse Primary Dial 32 pp. 2/13 978-0-8037-3769-3 $16.99 g “It’s not easy,” warns Singer in a note about the “reverso,” a verse form she created and first used in Mirror Mirror (rev. 3/10); and the first poem (“Fairy Tales”) in this companion [...]
While marketed as a two-volume music CD with an accompanying booklet, Natalie Merchant’s Leave Your Sleep might be better understood as a fascinating anthology of children’s poetry accompanied by biographical notes and two CDs on which each of the twenty-six poems is set to music. But it is even more than that. Leave Your Sleep [...]
From down in the bottom of the Horn Book boxes comes JonArno Lawson’s newest paperback collection of children’s poetry from Canadian publisher The Porcupine’s Quill. Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box (September 2012), a compilation of poems culled from one of Lawson’s earlier projects for falling outside its narrative scope, features [...]
Belt up your kirtles and hold onto your snoods. Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages by Nicholas Orme (Cornell University Press, May 2012) presents a variety of verse from days of yore. After a brief context-setting chapter (“Children’s Poetry from the Middle Ages”), Orme provides sections on “Growing Up,” “Words, Rhymes, [...]
All I know is that The toad takes some kind of bath And lives forever. (Tuck Everlasting) My teacher read it To show why we should always Listen to spiders. (Charlotte’s Web) The illustrations Showed corks growing in bunches Like fruit on the trees. (The Story of Ferdinand) A single gold tooth, One of them [...]
The McElderry Book of Mother Goose: Revered and Rare Rhymes compiled by Petra Mathers; illus. by the compiler Primary, Intermediate McElderry 96 pp. 8/12 978-0-689-85605-1 $21.99 e-book ed. 978-1-4424-5314-2 $12.99 Not since Leonard Marcus’s Mother Goose’s Little Misfortunes (rev. 11/90) has there been such a delightfully idiosyncratic selection. Drawn mostly from the canonical Opies (see [...]
Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses by Ron Koertge; illus. by Andrea Dezsö High School Candlewick 88 pp. 7/12 978-0-7636-4406-2 $19.99 A much-honored poet and novelist retells, in free verse and from various points of view, twenty-three familiar tales (mostly Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault). With a contemporary sensibility and voice, Koertge pitches directly to [...]
From the May/June 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Jennifer Brabander asks The President’s Stuck in the Bathtub author Susan Katz about writing presidential poetry. Read the full review of The President’s Stuck in the Bathtub here. Jennifer Brabander: Which president was the hardest to write a poem about? Susan Katz: James Monroe. The [...]
