Poetry Friday is here to enchant our eyes and ears!… In anticipation of Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep 15 – Oct 15), I am currently re-reading The Tree is Older Than You Are, an incredible anthology of bilingual poems from Mexico, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. And I’d like to share one of its many gems with you all:

The Poet Pencil
by Jesús Carlos Soto Morfín, translated by Judith Infante

Once upon a time a pencil wanted to write
poetry but it didn’t have a point. One day a boy
put it into the sharpener, and in place of a point,
a river appeared.

Wild Rose Reader is brimming with poetic activity as host of this week’s Poetry Friday round-up. Check it out.

Poet Janet Wong’s energy and dynamism really struck me when I interviewed her for our current issue of PaperTigers, and these qualities really come through in her recent interview with Elaine at Wild Rose Reader. It focuses on “her experience as a student in a master class on poetry taught by the late Myra Cohn Livingston, one of America’s foremost children’s poets and anthologists” – as well as being a great read itself, the comments that follow on from the interview have kept the conversation going…

Not only that, but Janet and Elaine have also invited readers of the interview to write their own poems including the words ring, drum and blanket, as this used to be one of Myra’s homework assignments. You can still join in – and if you need inspiration, you can read Janet and Elaine’s own offerings; there’s a great poem called Dragon Boat Festival by Diane Davis; and Cloudscome, Miss Rumphius Effect and Writing and Ruminating have all taken the challenge in wonderful and very different directions too.

Welcome, Year of the Rat!

To help you celebrate, here are a couple of new books we can recommend…

Grace Lin has a sequel just out to her delightful Year of the Dog – called, appropriately enough, Year of the Rat. We’ll have our own review of it soon, in the meantime, you can read what Grace herself says about it here.

You can read here about another new book by Grace, this time a picture-book called Bringing in the New Year. At the end of that post, Wild Rose Reader gives some good “Lunar New Year” links too.

And here are some more Chinese New Year picture books reviewed by PaperTigers:
The Year of the Rat: Tales from the Chinese Zodiac by Oliver Chin, illustrated by Miah Alcorn,;
The Great Race / The Story of the Chinese Zodiac by Dawn Casey, illustrated by Anne Wilson;
The Day the Dragon Danced by Kay Haugaard, illustrated by Carolyn Reed Barritt.

Do you have any special favorites you’d like to share with us?

…And a PS – do have a look at Grace Lin’s blog to read about her trip to China last month – there are some great photos too.