September 18, 2013

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Poetry Friday: More True Lies

Poetry_Fri

Check out the Poetry Friday roundup at GottaBook. National Poetry Month looms (but, you know, in a good way) and I’m counting down to the big event with a book spine poem each and every Friday in March. Interested in giving the book spine poem thing a shot? Try it with kids? Here are my [...]

Poetry Friday: Bang! Boom! Roar!

poetry friday button

National Poetry Month is nigh, and I’m posting a book spine poem every Friday until April. Want to try it? Maybe give it a shot with kids? Click here for some tips on creating your own. If you do give it a go, take a picture and post it to your blog, or send it [...]

Poet, Photographer Nancy Wood Dies at 76

nancywood

Award-winning poet, author, and photographer Nancy Wood, who devoted her career to exploring the culture and lives of the Native American people of the Southwest, died this week in Santa Fe, NM.

Review: Gone Fishing by Tamera Will Wissinger

Gone Fishing: A Novel in Verse By Tamera Will Wissinger Illustrated by Matthew Cordell Houghton Mifflin ISBN: 9780547820118 $15.99 Grades 1-4 In Stores *Best New Book* Find it at: Schuler Books | Your Library There are plenty of verse novels out there. Poetry books based around a theme are also common. Tamera Will Wissinger’s debut [...]

NYPL Launches National Poetry Contest on Twitter

NYPL Launches National Poetry Contest on Twitter

As part the library’s efforts to raise awareness about poetry leading up to National Poetry Month in April, NYPL is encouraging aspiring poets to “follow @NYPL on Twitter, and submit three poetic Tweets in English as public posts on your Twitter stream between March 1 and 10, 2013.”

Review of the Day: Stardines Swim High Across the Sky and Other Poems by Jack Prelutsky

Stardines Swim High Across the Sky and Other Poems By Jack Prelutsky Illustrated by Carin Berger Greenwillow Books (an imprint of Harper Collins) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-201464-1 Ages 4-8 On shelves February 26th. To non-children’s librarians the statistics are baffling. Your average poetry book isn’t exactly a circ buster. It sits on the shelf for months [...]

Weekly Reviews: Nonfiction for Browsing

Weekly Reviews: Nonfiction for Browsing

Teen behavior in libraries includes a lot of browsing. I have two different display spaces in my small high school library. Fortunately, one of them is right in front of my desk, so I often get the chance to watch students check out the latest books (surreptitiously, lest I scare them away!). Some will just [...]

Weekly Reviews: Francesca Lia Block and Ursula K. Le Guin

Today we feature new books by two authors well-known among teen readers. With Francesca Lia Block’s return to adult fiction we have, as Jamie says in her review, a perfect example of the New Adult category. In an Interview Magazine piece, Block was asked about the themes in this book, “In The Elementals, I explore the [...]

Pick of the Day: The Day Carl Sandburg Died (DVD)

Carl Sandburg b & w photo

The Day Carl Sandburg Died. DVD. 84 min. Prod. by Bonesteel Films. Dist. by PBS Dist. 2012. ISBN 978-1-60883-701-4. $24.99.
Gr 8 Up–Carl Sandburg, one of the most celebrated American poets of the 20th century, lived an incredibly colorful life which was reflected in his work. Born into an indigent family of Swedish immigrants in western Illinois, Sandburg initially held a series of manual labor jobs. Later he became a union activist, a social orator, and even a self-proclaimed anarchist. His [...]

Pick of the Day: Shiver Me Timbers!: Pirate Poems & Paintings

Book cover Kid pirates

FLORIAN, Douglas. Shiver Me Timbers!: Pirate Poems & Paintings. illus. by Robert Neubecker. 32p. CIP. S & S/Beach Lane Bks. Aug. 2012. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-1-4424-1321-4; ebook $12.99. ISBN 978-1-4424-5712-6. LC 2010048963.
Gr 2-5
–From the smiling, rollicking kids on the cover laying claim to a beach full of treasure to the shipload of fierce, sneering, plundering, cutlass-waving, face-making buccaneers, boastful of their scurrilous behavior, these pirates are a motley group. In 19 poems, they teach “Pirate Patter” and punishment and describe some [...]

An Unbiased Plug for My Mother

Okay.  That’s an outright lie, I suppose.  Who can be unbiased about their mom?  Particularly when their mom writes awesome poetry?  Particularly particularly when she has been published by The University of Nebraska Press and her book is out on shelves now.
You can’t trust me (obviously).  So I’ll just casually put these quotes from major [...]