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.

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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.

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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.”

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