Poems can be silly, serious, or fun, just like kids! Whether it’s the sing-song rhythm of a limerick, the serendipitous magic of a found poem, the deceptive simplicity of a haiku, or the easy familiarity of an acrostic poem, children are charmed by poetry. And what’s more fun than reading poetry? Writing it! In Explore Poetry! With 25 Great Projects children have fun learning about different forms of poetry while delving into different literary techniques such as personification, metaphor, and alliteration, all of which are discussed in a simple and accessible way. Activities include creative writing exercises designed to reinforce language arts skills, plus art projects that encourage children to visualize concepts and definitions. Short biographies of important poets reinforce the concept of poetry as an important part of society. Explore Poetry! meets Common Core State Standards for language arts; Guided Reading Levels and Lexile measurements indicate grade level and text complexity. Informational and inspiring, Explore Poetry! fits seamlessly into the poetry curriculum of grades 2 to 4 and serves as an enrichment resource all during the school year, especially April, Poetry Month.

Grade level: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, p, e, i, s, t.

Soon to be an Apple TV+ animated series starring Golden Globe nominee Beanie Feldstein and Emmy Award winner Jane Lynch, it's no secret that Harriet the Spy is a timeless classic that kids will love! Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. In her notebook, she writes down everything she knows about everyone, even her classmates and her best friends. Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before she can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together? "What the novel showed me as a child is that words have the power to hurt, but they can also heal, and that it’s much better in the long run to use this power for good than for evil."—New York Times bestselling author Meg Cabot

Poetry. California Interest. Environmental Studies. In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. FOSSILS IN THE MAKING presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade.

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

An award-winning poet offers a brilliant introduction to the joys--and challenges--of the genre In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about "poetry," whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike.

The venture of this inviting collection is to look, from the many vantages that the 35 poets in this eclectic anthology chose to look, at what it was—knowing that a poem can’t be conceived in advance of its creation—that helped their poems to emerge or connected them over time. The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry permits an inside view of how poets outwit internal censors and habits of thought, showing how the meticulous and the spontaneous come together in the process of discovery. Within are contained the work and thoughts of: Betty Adcock Joan Aleshire Debra Allbery Elizabeth Arnold David Baker Rick Barot Marianne Boruch Karen Brennan Gabrielle Calvocoressi Michael Collier Carl Dennis Stuart Dischell Roger Fanning Chris Forhan Reginald Gibbons Linda Gregerson Jennifer Grotz Brooks Haxton Tony Hoagland Mark Jarman A. Van Jordan Laura Kasischke Mary Leader Dana Levin James Longenbach Thomas Lux Maurice Manning Heather McHugh Martha Rhodes Alan Shapiro Daniel Tobin Ellen Bryant Voigt Alan Williamson Eleanor Wilner C. Dale Young