Poems inspired by traditional nursery rhymes depict the grim reality of inner city life, including such topics as crime, drug abuse, unemployment, and inadequate housing.

Poems inspired by traditional nursery rhymes depict the grim reality of inner city life, including such topics as crime, drug abuse, unemployment, and inadequate housing.

Presents a collection of traditional rhymes, rewritten to feature Russian characters and scenes.

A collection of nursery rhymes, both familiar and less known, illustrated with photographs in a city setting.

This book reappraises the place of children's literature, showing it to be a creative space where writers and illustrators try out new ideas about books, society, and narratives in an age of instant communication and multi-media. It looks at the stories about the world and young people; the interaction with changing childhoods and new technologies.

This joyful anthology celebrates the words, the rhymes, and the inspiration that create poetry. Included are poems by Eleanor Farjeon, Karla Kuskin, Eve Merriam, Lilian Moore, Jack Prelutsky, Nikki Giovanni, and others. With verse selected by Bobbye S. Goldstein and illustrated by Jane Breskin Zalben, this unique collection explores the wonder of poetry through poetry itself.

"An effervescent city child dances through a hot summer day until a thunderstorm brings welcome relief. Executed in collages made from color photographs, imaginatively redefined in unexpected juxtaposition....A wonderful concept book, grounded in ordinary events yet touched with magic, that will strike a familiar chord with preschool audiences while enlarging their perceptions. An auspicious debut!"--Horn Book.

A vivid and varied collection that addresses family loyalties, dysfunction, violence, and differences, Hurrah’s Nest is White’s imaginative and emotionally honest exploration of growing up the second oldest, first daughter of seven siblings. Childhood experiences are looked at with rawness, sensitivity, and crafted with precision: be it the cutting of her dreadlocks, mother’s abortion, drug trafficking, or her sister’s developmental disability, the language is tender and startling. Hurrah’s Nest—from the confusion of our lives—asks us to make meaning and good from what we’ve bargained and haven’t bargained for.

"South Park, Houston, Texas, 1977, is where we first meet Ti' John, a young boy under the care of his larger-than-life father - a working-class rodeo star and a practitioner of vodou - and his mother - a good Catholic and cautious disciplinarian - who forbids him to play with the neighborhood "hoodlums." Ti' John, throughout the era of Reaganomics and the dawn of hip-hop and cassette tapes, must negotiate the world around him and a peculiar gift he's inherited from his father and Jules Saint-Pierre "Nonc" Sonnier, a deceased ancestor who visits the boy, announcing himself with the smell of smoke on a regular basis. In many ways, Ti' John is an ordinary kid who loses his innocence as he witnesses violence and death, as he gets his heart broken by girls and his own embittered father, as he struggles to live up to his mother's middle-class aspirations and his father's notion of what it is to be a man. In other ways, he is different - from his childhood buddies and from the father who is his hero. The question throughout this layered and complex coming-of-age story is will Ti' John survive the bad side of life - and his upbringing - and learn how to recognize and keep what is good"--