WHOSE POO?

Two little white mice can’t stop wondering what other animals’ (including humans’) fecal matter looks like.

A father mouse is taking his two little mice to the zoo, but only if they promise not to talk about poo. They’re barely out the door (which fronts on a child’s bedroom) when they notice a poster of an astronaut on the wall and, in whispers, wonder what astronaut waste looks like. “Shiny, silver, space-age poo! / Rocket-powered weightless poo, / and it spins round and round / like a planet does too!” Their guess at a pink poodle’s poo? “Tiny, pink, pom-pom poo!” (the same as the lady in the pink, frilly dress walking the poodle). They imagine a gourmet chef would poo on a china plate, and the balloon sculptor’s would be “squeaky, bendy, blow-up poo.” In the same vein, at the zoo, all their scatological supposition is that each animal’s poo is somehow similar to the animal itself (penguin poo is snowman-shaped). Finally, Daddy overhears and shows them what the zoo does with all the poo (fertilize the plants)…so all these supposed differences don’t matter. Bird’s rhyming text is conveyed entirely in dialogue, and the only real surprise is that it takes Daddy so long to overhear his children. Coppo’s paintings have a pleasing matte quality to them, and they rise to the text’s challenge in their various renderings of turds, most of which look like brown soft serve ice cream. (The poo in an actual ice cream cone may be too much for weaker constitutions.) Humans depicted are diverse.

A manure manifesto for poo-ficionados.