POEMS I WROTE WHEN NO ONE WAS LOOKING

Katz and Koren follow up Oops! (2008) with another set of 100 or so rhymed (usually) knee-slappers paired to scribbly ink drawings.

So brisk and varied is the mix of wordplay (“I don’t like the ampersand. / You can’t hold it in your h&”), family humor and short meditations on food preferences, procrastination, peculiar traits of sibs, why there’s only one in a “pair” of underwear and like topics that it’s hard to stop reading—or reading aloud, for that matter. It’s all as child-friendly as can be, and the versifier’s casual tone finds echoes in the illustrator’s crosshatched sketches of figures showing a range of expressions while glancing bashfully or distractedly off to the side.

As clever and funny as the poetry of Jack Prelutsky in his prime and less edgy than Shel Silverstein’s, this deserves and should have no trouble drawing chuckles and belly laughs from a wide audience, even outside the confines of National Poetry Month.