Be A Frog A Bird Or A Tree

Children are encouraged to assume the attitudes and movements of other living things as they learn the principles of balance and muscle control

"With magical, concise and perceptive poems, Newbery-Honor winning author Joyce Sidman captures the life of a tree frog in an intimate and moving way. A master of the science note, her fascinating sidebars help bind the twin poems together and ground our perspective. We learn how treefrogs have sticky toe pads, how they still themselves when in danger, how they can change from green to gray to camouflage themselves - even how they eat their own skins, which is full of nutrients. The narrator's connection with this small creature brings solace, comfort, and a sense of mystery"--

“Tree Frog envies birds and dreams of flying. However, the birds he so admires, refuse to offer him any encouragement. Despite their rudeness, Tree Frog decides to try anyway. His first flight doesn’t end exactly the way he (or the birds) expected.”

When Leah and Alan awaken in an enchanted forest, they have only each other and their wits to guide them. In a world full of pet bees and giant rabbits, they befriend foppish lions and stone frogs. Learning to overcome danger, they find their way home— and their independence.

Filled with heart, humor, and relevance, this side-splitting picture book, Two Many Birds, by author/illustrator Cindy Derby, opens minds and entertains all at once. As birds line up to perch on a tree, a monitor shouts rules at them: No fluffin' feathers! No pooping on the ground! No nudity! Eventually, the tree fills to capactiy (100 birds), but what happens when two more are accidentally born among the branches?

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead—to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how we see ourselves and our world, mapping the strange and lyrical grammar of thinking and feeling. In “Watch Your Mouth,” a tree frog sings to overcome its fear of birds; in “Watch Your Step: The Kafka Virus,” a talking cat tells jokes in the Jim Crow South; in “Watch Your Head,“ green beans bling in the mouth of Lil Wayne, and Bob Ross paints your portrait. On the one hand, these fabulous fables, American sonnets, quarantine quatrains, and ekphrastic do-it-yourself sestinas animate what Toni Morrison called “the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one’s own race.” On the other hand, these urgent, personal poems contemplate fatherhood, history, and longing with remarkable openness and humanity. So To Speak is the mature, restless work of one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices.