Play ball!  The short snappy verses in POEM  RUNS by Douglas Florian will delight any reader who would prefer to have a baseball bat in his hands hoping to hit a homer. This poetry collection will be a winner with the youngest of baseball fans.  The author, Douglas Florian, is a poet and painter, an avid Mets fan, and a former Little League shortstop.  Batter up!  POEM RUNS  is an all-star grand slam. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt book, 2012

BUG OFF, CREEPY, CRAWLY POEMS by Jane Yolen with VERY close-up photographs by Jason Stemple is a humorous introduction to creepy-crawling bugs.  First, the reader meets an enormous brilliant green caterpillar nibbling across two full pages! The winged and wingless poems are illustrated with leap-off-the-page photographs of individual insects plus bits of information narratives. Jane Yolen introduces this poetry collection with a quote from Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore: “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”   A Boyds Mills Press: Wordsong book, 2012.