Fresh voices in contemporary poetry
The only imprint in children's publishing in America dedicated to poetry, Wordsong captures the vibrant, unexpected, emotional connections between text and young readers. Our books range from the silly to the serious and are infused with the wordplay and imagery that allow readers to view the world in new and thoughtful ways.
The March 1, 2009 issue of Kirkus Reviews features a review of Jane Yolen's A Mirror to Nature:
“The pages and photographs are vibrant and lively, the poems best for reading aloud. [A] good volume—along with other titles by this mother-son team—for teachers wanting to connect science and poetry.”
"The personifications are witty and evocative, and the vocabulary is choice enough that the explorations will be intriguing to veteran users and novices alike. ... Squiggly and energetic thumbnail-sized cartoons decorate most of the pages; a table of contents (which also identifies the part of speech for each featured word) opens the volume, and each word also gets a quick definition in a footnote underneath its poem." —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
"Salinger, a performance poet, offers short, funny and readable poems in this slim volume, which aims to help students with vocabulary words often found on standardized tests. ... Adding to the humor are Henderson’s—creator of the Magic Whistle comic book series—simple line illustrations. ... The poems are as well-intentioned as they are well-written." —Voice of Youth Advocates
"Childlike and sometimes amusing, the short, rhymed poems are accessible on their own and, with Shepperson’s illustrations, even more so. The expressive ink-and-wash drawings, which appear on every page, set up visual contexts for the poems and underscore the emotions and the humor found there." —Booklist
"These delightful poems center on a family's trip to the ocean and are told from the perspective of young Sam. ... In one poem, when the boy cannot take his pet gerbil, he tells readers he is taking a spider instead. "Oops" relates how it escapes. An amusing pen-and-ink illustration adroitly conveys the ensuing chaos. ... This book, with its expressive art that expands on the humor in each poem, should have wide appeal." —School Library Journal
