Poetry Friday: Never Tease a Weasel

If you know the work of the New Yorker cartoonist George Booth, you know how funny he is. His people and dogs often look how I feel sometimes—€”frazzled and slightly unhinged. But in a good way. Booth did the illustrations for a recent re-issue of the picture book Never Tease a Weasel, and the combination of his pictures and the jaunty rhyming wordplay of Jean Conder Soule adds up to a rollicking good read.

The book's summary says, "Illustrations and rhyming text present animals in silly situations, such as a pig in a wig and a moose drinking juice, along with a reminder not to tease."

An excerpt from Jean Conder Soule's text reads,

You could make a goat a coat
With a collar trimmed in mink;

Or give a pig a wig
In a dainty shade of pink.

You have to see George Booth's pig.

For a while I hadn't been bringing home that many picture books because, well, really, I was kowtowing to the idea that my very capable 7-year-old reader should be reading more chapter-ish books. The boy, however, knows what he likes, and he likes picture books. I picked up a stack of new ones at the library yesterday, and we have had the greatest time reading them together. This is how Junior sums up the book of the day: "The kids in the book keep teasing a weasel. At the end they watch TV with the weasel. And it's so funny."

Never tease a weasel and never kowtow.

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Today's roundup of other Poetry Friday posts can be found at the blog Big A little a.

Comments

[Jone]

This sounds like a really fun book, Susan. I will have to check it out.

[Susan]

Jone, I bet you and the kids at your school will have a great time with it!