For Laughing Out Louder: More Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone - Hardcover

For 30 years, Jack Prelutsky’s inventive poems have inspired legions of children to fall in love with poetry. His outrageously silly poems have tickled even the most stubborn funny bones, while his darker verses have spooked countless late-night readers. His award-winning books include Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast, The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, and The Beauty of the Beast.

While attending a Bronx, New York, grade school, Prelutsky took piano and voice lessons and was a regular in school shows. Surprisingly, Prelutsky developed a healthy dislike for poetry due to a teacher who “left me with the impression that poetry was the literary equivalent of liver. I was told it was good for me, but I wasn’t convinced.”

In his early twenties, Prelutsky spent six months drawing imaginary animals in ink and watercolor. One evening, he wrote two dozen short poetry verses to accompany each drawing. A friend encouraged him to show them to an editor, who loved his poems (although not his artwork!) and urged him to keep writing. Prelutsky listened and he is still busy writing.
Jack Prelutsky lives on Mercer Island in Washington with his wife, Carolynn.

Ages 3^-8. Prelutsky and Priceman repeat the successful combination of For Laughing Out Loud (1991) with nonsense verse from many poets and bright, slapstick illustrations. Much is visceral, literally ("I'm very grateful to my skin / For keeping all my insides in" ), with lots about smells, foods, and all kinds of bodily distortions and dislocations. Some verses fade out, with forced rhyme and blah repetition; but there's plenty of silliness in wordplay and situation to show kids that language can be fun. Lilian Moore's "I Left My Head" is wonderfully surreal; there's the same deadpan tone in X. J. Kennedy's "The Vacuum Cleaner's Swallowed Will." The poets in this anthology relish the sounds of words ("Down in Patagonia / A walrus caught pneumonia / From playing its trombonia / While swimming all alonia." " ). Everyone will have a favorite to read aloud. Hazel Rochman