Happy Monday! What a busy weekend! So busy I didn’t get Friday’s National Poetry Month poets posted like I’d planned. Friday, I finished up a several months-long editing project for a fellow poet and met him to go over final tweaks. His manuscript is a powerful one on the war in Ukraine and I can’t wait to see it in print.

Saturday Lancaster held its annual Literary Festival and I was invited to lead a writing workshop. It was a small class, but the Muse shows up even then. It was a fun group, with snippets of stories appearing even where ‘I’m not a writer’ was a unifying refrain. Then yesterday afternoon our local poets held a special open mic as part of the Literary Festival.

I’m sure you’ve also had those times when everything just vortexes like that, coming together all at the same time. It’s fun and energizing, but in my case one or two things usually get spun out that I pick up later. So tomorrow I’ll be back on track and introduce you to those poets who were supposed to be here on Friday. But today is Book Review Monday! so of course it’s a book of poetry, and this is a special one.

I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry is a book of poems for children. The poems are written by several different poets. Editor Rachel S. Donahue invited several poet friends to submit poems on various broad topics that she then curated into this delightful book.

Most children learn poetry through nursery rhymes, without anyone calling them poems. This book picks up where nursery rhymes leave off and is fit for those up to age 10 or 11, maybe 12. Several poems are for that older age range. The book is divided into six categories: Flora & Fauna, Dreams & Whimsy, Unexplorable Depths, Cautionary Tales, Vittles, and Humans.

In Flora & Fauna, poems are about the usual suspects–flowers, insects, bugs, birds, etc. The artwork throughout the book is by Emily J. Person, and each page is a work of art … or most often several works of art. The opening spread is littered with images that are found throughout the book, adding to the reading experience as kiddos look for the objects while reading. Or being read to.

Dreams & Whimsy celebrate faeries and Jack Frost, sleeping in hammocks and traipsing through woods, and all the places imagination stirs. Here’s Winter, the troll not happy with spring’s arrival.

Galaxies and spaceships, the Loch Ness Monster and messages in a bottle are some of the topics for poems in Unexplorable Depths.

Cautionary Tales is the home of The Bogey, who no longer lives under one’s bed but is now on the golf course meddling and scheming to take your par away. It’s the place where the Cursed Beta-Carotene comes out and so does a dragon, toasting one from head to toe.

Vittles is longest section because food can be so poetic. A poem about Pie? Of course. Broccoli? Why not? Popcorn and candy, okra and dragonfruit, lemonade and curry. And who could resist these fellas who came to eat meatballs?

The final section, Humans, is about the dailyness of being two-legged creatures. We dance, we track in mud. We explore fresh snow and question the universe. And so much more.

And it all becomes poetry.

We’re in the final week of National Poetry Month so my plan is to finish the last few poets this week. I do have some more wonderful poets to introduce you to. Stop by tomorrow and you’ll meet the next two. See you then!

You can find I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry through Bandersnatch Books.