By Margot Kahn

On Saturday I trolled for places back home.
Home as in the place I was raised,
not that elusive ancestor thing, the soul or—

just the place where my mother set plates
of flank steak in front of me, or left me
with a cardboard box, the frozen trays.

When everything’s up in flames,
I yearn for a yard I know the edge of—
for lightning bugs trapped in a punched-lid jar;

the lip of the brick fireplace where my father sang
his Navy songs, and the kitchen where my mother baked
blackberry pie that bled out across the floor;

the days I drove myself to school and picked myself up,
hotwired the minivan, got felt-up, and learned about loneliness
from a phone attached to the wall;

the place my parents were the first to be born to,
the place I had the privilege of being bored;
the place I had the privilege of leaving.

Here, from my kitchen window, the hills are first
to disappear. Then goes the fence, the garden,
the rutted gravel drive. My lungs hurt just watching it,

reading in sans serif that friends had minutes to flee.
I see the hill behind their house awash in light, ablaze—
a transcendental image for an Instagram age.

She posts it as they’re rushing away to the country
of the displaced—a land I know the scent of,
a language I, too, can speak.

By Emily Nason

I’ve taken communion in horse troughs
and creeks and off the back of a stamp licked
by the boy I love, and still I have nightmares.
Like this: every person I forgot to send
a thank-you note to brings it up the next time
I see them. Like this: the cicadas haven’t hatched
when they said they would. Years escape us.
Ancestral cattle herding calls, whole choirs
of Ozark harps, cotton looms starting to spin.
Splash of kerosene. Mildewed family photos,
faces burned out. Like this: I’m crouched
in the kitchen, watching my grandmother
throw a jar of Duke’s Mayonnaise against
the wall. And then she mops it up and repeats.
Same jar. I roll the stone up the hill,
and by stone I mean the rendered red roux,
and by hill, I mean the blackened pot.
My grandmother again, rehab parking lot,
threatening to kill herself, backing down
last minute by saying, I wouldn’t do that
to y’all even though you test me. Like this:
I date a man who buys instant grits.
Like this: Lindsey Graham. Copper chicken
wire of a welt around my thigh, no clue how
it got there, and a roomful of questions.
In the back of the country store, I sit and watch
my legs dangle from thick fishing hooks, two more
fatty thighs to cure and sell. Strawberry Moon.
Sturgeon Moon. Worm Moon. A night sky
with all three. My grandmother wakes me up
to look at them. She reminds me that I’m like her:
last to leave this long party, eyes shucked open.

By Emily Nason

And I can see them, see her
standing over the kitchen sink,
gray shrimp pinched
and the up-flick of her knife.

                                                                                                       (No stories in this poem,
                                                                                                       Emily. Stay in the room.)

Right. Doctor’s white gloves.
Gardenia white. This is my hand
on your thigh. Unpruned oleander.
You’re going to feel a pinch.

                                                                                                       (Stay just a little while longer.)

Hot examination room.
Small country clinic with one broken
air conditioner. The doctor sees
retirees and pregnant housewives,
mainly. Once, a man who took
a tree trunk straight to the sternum.

                                                                                                       (He survived, remember?
                                                                                                       It’s not your story to tell.)

I’ve forgotten to take off my gold
hoops. In the corner, nude lace bra
and underwear crumpled
in the chair. A blue jumpsuit—
It has pockets! Pockets!—I wore
that night in Ohio, when I fell
and sprained a wrist bringing
a dozen fresh eggs to a friend,
no carton, just my pockets.

                                                                                                       (Stop. Back to your body, now.)

Another pinch. Give me one big
cough. Formaldehyde in the veins,
moonshine in the eyes. I’m alive.
From crotch to toes: a cramp.

                                                                                                       (There’s been worse pain.
                                                                                                       Move it along.)

By Emily Nason

Featured Art: Mid Winter by Pamela Fogg

I am predisposed: toothed gardenia. Just like my mother’s
mother. I ask the doctor what to do. She says, Consult the oracles,

read the tea leaves. Which means, Keep taking your meds.
Which means, Watch who you procreate with. I’m not sure

I’m happier now. I just feel things less. Not quite a numbness,
but a lack. When my dog sees a dog that looks like her, she cocks

her head, as if to say, Huh. Isn’t that something? Smart girl,
but it frightens me that she knows, retains, what she looks like.

I am frightened of a lot of things, but not of what awaits. Side effects:
a comfort or ideation with fresh dirt and ashes. Visiting the family burial

plot, the caretaker tells us, We can stack ’em six deep. Economical,
I think. My mother asks him to trim the nearby tree, it’s obscuring

her mother’s grave. Two rows down, a marble headstone reads,
Stand back, I’m coming up! Okay. Where are you going to go?

By D. R. Goodman

On a night when something like fog obscures the city,
and dry trees loom through heavy wisps of gray,
I’m stopped, and stare. Faint orange lights shine through
at intervals in a breathless span of blankness
where any other night, the simple darkness
would glitter as if with pearls. This streetlamp, too,
is strange in its ashen haloed light, the way
it burns my eyes, and sweeps me through with pity.

That campfire smell, as we at first mistake it,
grows acrid—treated lumber, metal rail,
scorched cars, life’s treasures, all they had to show,
now airborne from a hundred miles away.
We’re stardust. On the airwaves, just today,
some rock star physicist proclaimed it so.
It burns my lungs. Bewildered, I inhale
the dust of those who ran and didn’t make it.

By David Thoreen

On the side of the house I dug a ditch
than ran the length of my life. When
it rained, I chipped away with adze
and spade, then lined the whole with fabric:
the wool suit I wore for first communion,
my Batman costume from fifth grade
Halloween, the satin bowling shirts
I rescued from an uncle’s cedar chest
after he died (June, the summer I turned
thirteen), a drawer of cotton tees, and the
pale shirts and rich silk ties I purchased
for a job that swallowed my twenties
like an anxious and ravening other, the tux
in which I married, even a sweatshirt
that said Des Moines, in cursive. All this
was stretched along the ditch. I threw in
the newspapers I’d delivered—three years’
worth—and the time I’d devoted to folding them,
each already beyond penance or prayer.

I pitched in my last confession, a couple
of car accidents, the week in the ICU
after my appendix burst. Good riddance
to the dances where I got drunk, the hangovers
that followed. It was hard to let go of the night
I stood on a golf course in Mason City, Iowa,
looking up at the Milky way, a night that was warm
and smooth in my fingers, but in the end, I dropped
it in too, along with the day my son was born,
and the light in my wife’s eyes as she held him.
I covered it all with a layer of leaves, and over that
rakes seven tons of crushed stone. Anyone
passing this edge of arborvitae would see
a simple path, leading from here to there.

By Annie Trinh

Featured Art: “Vessel” by Byron Armacost

This is you: a thirty-year-old mother who had a miscarriage, a wife whose husband left her, a daughter who steps into a medicine shop and looks at the walls of herbs. You press your fingers against glass jars, hoping to find a solution for a successful birth. A bag of maca. A bundle of chasteberries. A box of cinnamon. You take these medicines to the owner, asking if these plants will help with fertility or make your body strong enough to handle carrying a child. And this is your savior: a Vietnamese woman in her seventies who has wrinkles around her eyes and tells stories of her survival through the Indochina and Vietnam Wars. A mother who understands the importance of obtaining children. A sister who sees your pain as you push the herbs in her direction, wondering how much you need. Your savior tells you that you don’t need these herbs—they won’t help, and she goes into the back room and then comes out with a wooden box. Your savior opens it up and snuggled within the purple cloth are twelve large eggs. Brown and spotted with freckles. You place an egg into your palm, cradling it as if it is ready to sleep. Soft heartbeats thump against your fingers.

Eat these duck fetuses, your savior says, and it will help you get what you want.

By Sarah Suhr

He rides a horse // by the fire station
______in Falls City // to slip his resume
into the soft hand // of a secretary—this happens
______before he says, // You carry yourself
in an idyllically classy way // I’d be proud
______ to have you // on my arm. _____ I only think
of alliteration: // of belt buckle—
______the one he wears // while singing karaoke.

                                                               I take my fishing pole to Beaver Lake
                                                               after work and a blackbird squawks
                                                               a breathless death song at the roadside.
                                                               She has no friends circling the bruised
                                                               sky, so I sit in the gravel beside her, wait
                                                               for night to bleed in between the stars.

On Hinge, a man miles // of mountains away
______sends me a message: // I’ve been staring at your
clavicle for hours. // And I consider all the bones
______of women beneath // the earth’s surface—
how this man’s bootsoles // must sound against rocks.

                                                               I enter the chicken coop with a baseball bat
                                                               and basket as my mother has coached.
                                                               The bat I one-handedly swing at
                                                               a buckish cock kicking up chicken shit
                                                               and feathers. I don’t intend to hit him—
                                                               just snatch the eggs and run, but I see
                                                               the scrawny hen he plucks to patches,
                                                               and I wonder about the sunglasses
                                                               my mother wears indoors.

My ex says, I do // more than most men,
______or here’s a pillow // perfect for suffocation—take it,
put it on your face. // My grandfather pours the concrete
______foundation of his house, // my stepdad rebuilds
cars and cooks dinner, // my uncle drives his kids
______to school after working the night // shift. What’s
more than most men? // What’s more than most women?

                                                               The goose’s head is still on the chopping
                                                               block. Her headless body runs around
                                                               the yard—blood coming from her neck
                                                               like a slow sprinkler head. She rushes into
                                                               the Bermuda grass at my ankles. My ankles
                                                               itch—and, for not crying, I am tough.

Another Hinge connection. // This time by phone—
______You’d look great on my // motorcycle, he says.
I’m also smart, I say. // Yeah? Well, you’d still
______look great on my motorcycle. // This feels
like the definition of female // or cartwheel or dog chasing tail.

                                                               In the potboil is a cow’s slick tongue—
                                                               rigid and rolling in its fatty dross,
                                                               each impurity clumped together
                                                               like an inkblot or divination. O Oracle!
                                                               O Ladle! Speak to me of the sour
                                                               stink in this house. Help me remember
                                                               the soft ears of a calf.

By Michael Lavers

Featured Art: smokey man by Byron Armacost

Mr. ———, who loved buttered muffins, but durst not eat them
because they disagreed with his stomach, resolved to shoot himself;
and then he eat three buttered muffins for breakfast, before shooting
himself, knowing that he should not be troubled with indigestion.
—Boswell

I want to ask poor Mr. ——— why, if life’s
so bad, he paused to savor them at all? But I
know why. How could the scent that spirals
up the stairs not sway him, for the moment,
to put down the gun, and come, and break
a muffin open, watch the steam spill out?
To wedge fresh butter in each porous hinge?
To want, for once, to live one moment longer:
there are muffins, after all. And here is butter
catching candle-light, sighing its soft glissando
down the spongy muffin-flesh, hinting
that joy, though soft and all-too solvent, still
anoints some moments with its glossy smear:
joy in the mint-flecked ruminations of the cow
at milking time, the greasy fingers of the girl
who sets her pail of white froth down and lies
under the ilex boughs and weeps over some boy,
then in a minute gets back up, and wipes
her cheeks, shakes out her thatch-flecked hair;
not that she knows some pleasure’s only felt
because it ends, that it cannot be held, raised up
like curds of butter that her mother calls forth
from the churning chaos like fermented light.
Not that. She just remembers there are muffins
waiting for her, too, back in the house, and when
they’re gone, maybe some milk. Maybe an apple.
Maybe, since it’s not impossible, some cheese.

By Michael Lavers

You’re gone, and in the season you loved best,
when lamps go on at six, then five, then four,
and you’d rush to the lake, eager to test

the ice, let down your bait. The coat you wore
for years, scale-stained, hangs in the closet still,
a great dumb fish. You’re not you anymore,

and so won’t need it there, over whatever hill,
out on what lake there is, to stand above
a chiseled hole where lines and snowslush spill

into the green and quiet parlors of
a shadow world, and feel the poor flesh heaving
as the line twangs, tugging at your glove.

To peer down, breathless, changed, but grieving
at the cold hard brilliance of the living.

By George Choundas

My cousin married a woman who was an only child. Her mother had two sisters. These aunts had no children of their own.

The three sisters all treated this woman, my cousin’s wife, as their daughter. In her youth she was dandled and spoiled and trophied. The three sisters were her regents, she their queen. This is all from my cousin. I didn’t know her when she was growing up. Neither did he. They went to the same middle school, my cousin and his wife, but they ran with different sets of kids. They got genuinely acquainted only a couple of years ago, his mother bumping into her mother at Lord & Taylor. He knew the family dynamic from bits and pieces: things she told him, things friends and relatives told him, not being blind.

She grew up to be an engaging person, and thoughtful. This I can report. But also moody, and prone to self-involvement, and fond of spending money and nursing wounds and spending money to nurse wounds. She saw catastrophe in the merest challenges. In all the time I knew her she never asked me a question.

She laughed rarely, never at things I said. Once I suggested she come up with a new origin story for the grandchildren. They would be like, What’s Lorden Tailor?, and she’d be like, A store at the mall, and they’d be like, What’s a mall?, and of course no matter what she said they wouldn’t get it, Retail? What’s a retail?, et cetera, and unless her grandchildren were French absurdists this infinite regression would not satisfy. That’s what I said, French absurdists and infinite regression, and she gave me a look you give orphans with rabies.

By J.C. Scharl

“My heart is like a pomegranate”
as a simile seems a little simplistic
these days (even the meter beats
too neatly to seem true)
but nonetheless
there’s something to it:
how a pomegranate cracks
and bleeds a little when opened,
no matter how gentle your hands
and how a few seeds spill out
like little dreams, smoldering crimson
as coals around a dark core.
How more seeds cling
to the membrane in a strangled
Fibonacci order, so determined
to hold their place that each
is a little misshapen. How
at the deep recesses of the fruit,
so deep it is nearly the bottom,
there is a bad patch,
the underbelly of a faint bruise
on the outer skin,
where a brown ooze festers,
leaking its slow poison.

By Robert Cording

If he were alive, he might have shrugged
and said, things happen for no reason,
but he wasn’t, he was only my son
in a dream, where he found me
sitting in the woods trying to understand
his death. The light looked
as if it were coming from below not above,
rising up out of the ground,
the way darkness first spools around
the trunks of trees and then climbs higher.
I was so happy to be speaking with him,
but, in the middle of what I was saying,
he disappeared. I kept sitting where I was,
as if he’d return again, but I knew
nothing else was going to happen.
When I woke, I had that feeling
I often have when getting into bed
of both dread and the possibility of relief.
I was still partly in the dream, and I felt
he was like a god, utterly removed,
and not knowable any longer.
Shaking, I sat up and tried to focus on
the larches outside feathering the wind,
and a sliver of moon that caught and released
a scrim of fast-moving clouds. I breathed in
the smell of the grass I’d mowed
that afternoon, then rolled toward my wife
whose skin was cool to my touch. Far off
in the woods, I heard the sense-startling
yips and bawls of a pack of coyotes.
All of it came to me in a wave of sensations
impossible to put into words and yet, oddly,
felt like a gift, something like an answer
to a question I could not remember asking him.

By Robert Cording

I just wanted to sit, shut my eyes,
tilt my face to the sun, and try not to think,
but the koi, insistent, unappeasable,
crowded to my end, the water roiling
with their need, and, when I opened my eyes,
I saw them lift their bulbous heads,
making sounds with their rubbery, barbeled lips
as if they were gasping for air.
When I shut my eyes again
because I did not want to see, I saw
the little outdoor fireplace on my son’s deck,
embers still burning. The October day
had not yet come into being,
the light anomalous, something between
night and morning. Inside, on the floor
of his living room, my son was dead.

His wife had waited with his body
until my wife and I arrived.
We lay next to him, touched his hair,
his forehead, his cheeks, his lips and chin—
and then I heard myself
trying to tell him we were there, we were
with him, we loved him,
but my words were more like moans
than words, every word sounding
its helplessness. When I opened my eyes,
there were the koi, their too-small pond
swirling with color—white, yellow,
black and white, gold, red and white—
all of them entangled, straining against
each other, mouths agape, turning
and turning in their net of water.

By David Gullette

I have spent years shying away from this poem
this poem in which I try to capture a single gesture of my father’s—

November 1967—a “berry aneurysm” has exploded in my brother’s skull
so I fly down to Raleigh and spend the night in the room
that became mine after our sister went off to college

Early next morning I hear the front door open
and go to the window
my father is leaving the house
I signal him to wait

We drive straight out Everett for the hospital
unspeaking
as we near Cameron Village the sun
peeks over the roof of Sears

And he takes his right hand off the wheel
and palm up lifts it toward the sun . . .

Even as I watch him I know there is more going on here than
“The world breaks our hearts and the indifferent sun simply
goes on doing what it has to”

More than
“So begins the first day without my younger son”

More than
“My older son is with me, together we bear witness to an iron law”

Dance is the art I know least
but I do love to watch a skilled dancer slowly revolve
and tilt his torso
and lift a hand to make a gesture toward the other dancer across the stage
and if you ask me to tell you what that hand is saying . . .

I was right to dread this poem

By Ruth Baumann

I drive 45 minutes to send a man
five states away photos of a sunset
over an alligator-speckled wildlife refuge.
He is a bright possibility, & he breaks
the tired in me. We talk about how nice
it is to be so small. I stand & stare
into the high waters as they night-blacken,
think how beautiful it is to not struggle.
Occasionally there’s a vague splash, but nothing
clashes in the water. Nothing happens,
which might be a stand-in for everything
true happening, because as I start to drive home,
darkness folding like a loose tarp over the earth,
I do that thing where I think in love.

By Amy Bagwell

when after thirty years my father
tells me not a day has gone by when
I have not thought of you I reply:  

        1. that’s a lot of nots.
        2. do you think this is a movie? do you think you’re the star?
        3. saying that is like wearing black to a funeral. it doesn’t prove anything.

& he might be speaking again
when I get in my car & back over
my phone on purpose & drive

to one of those nightmare stores
full of bright teeth & paperwork
& devices with new numbers that

fathers don’t have which is unfair
since it was me who called him
after thirty years which is the kicker

By Tara Orzolek

Apparently there are dark forces that are trying to mess with the cosmos.
I learn that & I learn that a boy I slept with out of pity in college is about to become famous.
I try to not send anything bad through him via the cosmos like brain waves with spikes.
Like a shark attack or something traveling invisible through space-time directly to his well-being.
I try to be good this time.
I try to manage my accounts & wipe myself clean of spam & triple xxx junk.
I try to think good thoughts & procure good karma.
It will reign over me like a rainbow & I will strip naked to soak up all the good things
I get from these good thoughts.
Lower blood pressure & a spot in the afterlife etc.
But I strain to not let some bad molecules slip out & cause chaos.
Cause chaos for what?
Nothing really because he doesn’t remember me or does probably but doesn’t think about me.
The sex was mediocre & although inexperienced I knew it could be better than that.
That it could feel like a bed closing up on you.
Surrounding you from all sides & bulleting liquid pleasure into your brain.
A multicolored injection of happiness.
It was in a sleigh bed.
The ceiling was above the sleigh bed & it was peeling.
I could not see the cosmos from there.

By Marcia LeBeau

I gave birth to two reluctant readers. Not that they won’t read or don’t like being read to, it’s just that books are a hard sell. From the beginning, my well-loved copy of Beatrix Potter’s Apply Dapply Nursery Rhymes was of no interest to them. Sweet storybooks, classic and contemporary, with simple narratives and obvious morals didn’t hold their attention either. Believe me, I tried.

I could sometimes get a Shel Silverstein poem in under the radar without much backlash and Mo Willems was more than tolerated. Most of the time, though, my sons would slide off my lap and run to something more exciting, like a backhoe pushing gravel from one side of our street to the other. You might think Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site would have done the trick, but no. This was not the cozy, glowing realm of parent-child bonding I had imagined.

While I didn’t want to subscribe to a gender binary, I heard from children’s authors that, most often, the kids who aren’t interested are the boys. The ones who shout out from the back of the bookstore, “Reading is boring!” and bust out their Matchbox cars. I also heard from a librarian that kids don’t know nursery rhymes anymore. None. So, I begrudgingly put poetry on hold, but I wouldn’t give up on storybooks. I just had to go a little further afield than expected.

By Jared Harél

I don’t remember being read to as a child. My parents were good ones—doting and thoughtful—so perhaps I was, but nothing comes to mind. In fact, I recall only three books in my childhood home, each a disregarded fixture, like doormats or drapes. In the living room, there was a mass-market paperback of The Firm. Its cover depicted some poor suit dangling over marble green, his brown attaché case just out of reach. Upstairs, a cream-colored copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sat on my mom’s nightstand, half-buried beneath coupons and ancient receipts. Lastly, we owned a massive, musty brick of Shakespeare’s Collected Plays I later learned had been there the day we moved in, and which we humored on a shelf above our treasured Nintendo. God knows how I became an English major, let alone a writer. All this is to admit that my true introduction to children’s books came when I finally had kids of my own.

What I found upon arrival was varied to say the least. I’d expected the fantastical: hippos in bow ties, transportation with faces, moral platitudes packaged in bright, garish fonts and delivered by ducklings with an aptitude for end-rhyme couplets. And sure, there was plenty of that. But there were other things too, like the hypnotic lullaby of Goodnight Moon, or the spare, incisive grace of Last Stop On Market Street, as clear and nuanced as a classic blues song. In the latter, as CJ and his nana begin their long bus ride home, I encountered the following lines: “The outside air smelled like freedom, but it also smelled like rain.” This was writing of strangeness and beauty. A children’s book can do that? I vividly recall thinking, till my pajama-clad kids poked my stomach, eager to get a move on, to keep reading.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

In one of his most famous poems, Richard Wilbur writes that “love calls us to the things of this world,” and no children’s literature celebrates the things of this world quite like Arnold Lobel’s charming Frog and Toad series. Beyond its beautiful illustrations and clever humor, the series revels most in a love of what keeps us alive and of language itself. In this way, the Frog and Toad series becomes, in many ways, a gateway to the world of poetry.

Stylistically, the Frog and Toad books, vignettes about two close friends sharing in life’s adventures, mirror poetry more than prose. As books for early readers, they include language that is simple but musical, and the text does not always reach the end of the page but rather breaks at certain words, like a poem. This amplifies the pleasure of reading them aloud (as they should be read), but it also means that, like poetry, each line holds its own weight and carefully wrought cadence.

For example, in the story “Spring,” Frog’s description of Spring reads like a catalogue of the joys of being alive. As Frog tries to rouse Toad from his winter hibernation, grumpy Toad complains about the bright light, to which Frog kindly replies,

By Eric Redfern

      A small speckled visitor  
              wearing crimson cape,
      brighter than a cherry,
              smaller than a grape.

      A polka-dotted someone
            walking on my wall,
      a black-hooded lady
            in a scarlet shawl.

At five years old, I experienced this Joan Walsh Anglund poem as both charming and creepy. The lilting trochees and cheery rhyme scheme told me that to read the poem was to play a friendly game. But the red cape and black hood? These are the sartorial choices of a villain. A villain, not the villain: there were more of them, and by the fifth line my world would blur at its edges, where tiny, spotted, unidentified “someones” almost palpably teemed. Most troubling and fascinating of all, I could not determine if this “lady” was a bug or a woman, small or tall, dangerous or safe. Anthologies have resolved this ambiguity for their readers by titling the poem “Ladybug,” much as Mabel Loomis Todd domesticated Dickinson’s poems with ordinary titles like “The Bee” or “The Humming-Bird.” But in the illustrated book I had, Anglund’s poems were untitled, and the ambiguity strikes me now as appropriate: ladybugs are “good” garden denizens; most are also carnivorous. Reading about the poem’s “speckled visitor,” my mind made something like a 3-D hologram portrait that morphs into a specter as it’s tilted first one way, then another. Haunting each other, both images stayed strange.

By Adrienne Su

Since my parents always made room for more books in our Atlanta home, I thought I knew what I was doing when, at six, I decided to be a writer. I wrote my first “poem” soon afterwards, in 1974, and never went back on the decision, producing stories, poems, and attempts at novels. Yet not until college did I write from the perspective of an Asian American speaker. One reason for the delay is surely that children’s books with Asian characters, never mind Asian American characters, were vanishingly scarce. A 2016 study by Angela Christine Moffett, “Exploring Racial Diversity in Caldecott Medal-Winning and Honor Books,” found that of the 332 Caldecott books published between 1939 and 2016, thirteen, or 1%, had Asian or Asian American primary characters. My brother and I recall from our childhood only two picture books with Asian main characters: The Five Chinese Brothers, by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese (1938), and Tikki Tikki Tembo by Arlene Mosel and illustrated by Blair Lent (1968) both of which are still in print.

The Five Chinese Brothers, in which the titular characters use superpowers to evade a death sentence, has been criticized for racially caricatured illustrations and the unexplained identicalness of the brothers. Defenders argue that the book evokes nostalgia for many, the art represents a different time, and it’s based on a Chinese folktale.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

But I, I love it when you read to me
And you, you can read me anything.
—Stephin Merritt, “The Book of Love”

“I tried to get lots of poetry ones,” said the mom. She’d been to some thrift stores and library sales. She handed her son a big bag of kids’ books. They were for his children, the mom’s grandkids.

By “poetry ones” the mother meant rhyming ones. By telling her son this, she meant, “I know you’re a poetry person.” By that she meant, “I know you’re somewhat of a snob.”

Ten years later . . .

“Dad. What are you doing? I’m in bed. I’m sleeping in here.”

“Sam. Sorry. I need to write something about kids’ books. I kind of waited a little too long, and they’re kind of starting to lay out the magazine. I just needed some material from your shelves.”

“Nope.”