Written and Illustrated by Calef Brown
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010
32 Pages
Poetry Collection
The cover of this book jumped out at me! I thought it was so cute and colorful, and obviously a Halloween theme. You don't even have to see the title to know that! This is considered non-sense verse, and it is hilarious! I think I laughed the most at the back inside flap where it talks about the author, Calef Brown. It says, "Calef Brown is a blue phantom elephant. He wrote these poems in a moldy mausoleum on the coast of Maine." What a description! These poems are full of nonsense, but it is so fun! They are all one page long or shorter. My favorite poem in the collection is "Cat Battle". It talks about two cats fighting and that you better not "get in the middle, or you'll end up covered in cat spittle."
The illustrations are quite dream-like, but have a noticeable geometric quality about them. The colors are mostly very vibrant and are contrasting, however some are quite dark. The colors are a lot of yellows, oranges, and greens, very Halloween-like. The illustrations were done in acrylic.
I think that this poetry collection is appropriate for all ages! I would read these poems to my class around Halloween. As I said earlier, the pictures are very geometric. You could pull out certain poems and try to see how many the students could find in each picture. There is a poem entitled "Mummy Unhappy" and it is about a mummy that wasn't mummified correctly. You could use this for a hook into a history lesson about ancient Egypt. You could also use this collection just for the study of poetry.
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