PUSH-PULL MORNING

A dog and a child joyously demonstrate gravity, friction, inertia, and other physical phenomena.

With an eye to her STEM-centric theme, Peters outfits her free-verse romps with titular references to physics and parenthetical identifications of relevant topics or principles—so that, for instance, in “Extra Electrons #2 (Electricity),” “My generous dog / gives me electrons / on cool, dry days” by rolling on a carpet until she is “excessively negative” and then bestowing a nose kiss: “Zap!” Likewise, digging claws into a carpet at bathtime and then escaping when soaped and slick demonstrate friction and its lack; zooming down a playground slide shows gravity in action; and if the poet mentions only three stages of matter in “Phase-Crazy Dog” (“My amazing dog / is like a Gas / whenever she chases flies. / She leaps! She jumps! / She’s everywhere at once!”), she does hint that there are others in the expansive set of notes on each poem at the end. In exuberantly drawn sketches, Bloch places a hyperactive canine of indeterminate breed and a dark-skinned child of ambiguous gender with a lighter-skinned Aunty Rosa as caregiver amid stars or jagged lines and other indicators of motion or energy flow. The final entry leaves physics behind for a loving “Paradox”: “My cosmic dog and I / are just / specks / in outer space,” but “we are in the center / of our universe.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Playfulness and pedagogy intertwined.