Volume 4, No. 36: My Favorite Picture Books of 2024

AKA Picture Books for Life

Greetings, book and treat people! Buckle up, because it’s Best Of Season! I wasn’t going to make a bunch of end-of-year favorites lists this year, but then I started going through my reading spreadsheet, and it reminded me just how many great books I’ve read this year. And then, predictably, I got carried away. So this is the first of four newsletters you’ll get this week and next. Coming soon: nonfiction, poetry, and fiction.

This year I undertook a reading project for joy: to read one picture book every day. I had no idea, when I came up with this idea last fall, how profoundly it would change my (reading) life. I have fallen head-over-heels, knee-deep-in-the-grass, up-to-my-eyes-in-stars, wild-as-the-ocean in love with picture books. I truly believe that all adults should be reading them, and if you’re not, you’re missing out on one of the greatest pleasures, the greatest miracles, of being a human who reads. I hope you give yourself a gift and read at least one of the books on this list before the year ends.

It’s only December 16th, but since I sometimes read more than one book a day for a special occasion, or read a longer book over many days, I’ve already read 365 picture books this year. These are my 80 favorites. Yes, you read that right. 80. Narrowing it down to 80 was hard enough. Did I mention how green-as-spring-woods, bright-as-summer-flowers, blazing-as-fall-trees, deep-as-winter-snow in love I am with picture books? You know I’m a maximalist by now, and you know how wordy I can be, and still I cannot convey to you how much I love picture books.

I won’t be reading and reviewing a picture book every single day in 2025 like I did this year. But I will, of course, still be reading picture books! I’ll be reading them for the rest of my life. You can find my sporadic reviews here.

Finally, if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you’ve already heard me thank

Sarah Miller

, whose fantastic newsletter

Can we read?

is the reason I started reading picture books in the first place. Well, I’m thanking her again. Endless gratitude. And one more big (unrelated) thank you: I am so touched by those of you have purchased books from my 40 by 40 Wishlist! There’s no way for me to know who you are, but every time a package arrives in the mail I am surprised and moved. I’m so excited to share more about this reading journey next year!

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Some notes on the list:

• It includes the best picture books I read in 2024, not just books published in 2024.

• It’s organized by moods and themes.

• It includes 80 books. I already told you why. Don’t @ me.

• Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review.

• A number of these books (including some of my absolute favorites) are out of print. If the title isn’t linked, or if the link takes you to an author’s webpage, that’s why. I got every book on this list, including the out of print ones, from my library.

• The year isn’t over yet, so this list is not definitive. It also doesn’t include rereads.

For the Most Perfect Storytelling

Sun and Moon Have a Tea Party by Yumi Heo (words) & Naoko Stoop (art) (2020): A wise and whimsical story about two friends (Sun and Moon) caught up in a disagreement.

Blue Floats Away by Travis Jonker (words) & Grant Snider (art) (2021): This is a book about the water cycle and it’s also a poem. It’s about the natural world and natural cycles, and it’s also about cycles of life—growing up and changing and dying and becoming something else.

Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes (1991): This is the sweetest and most joyful book about a mouse named Chrysanthemum who loves her name until she goes to school, where all her classmates start teasing her relentlessly. It’s very real and also very, very full of love.

Mouse Trouble by John Yeoman (words) & Quentin Blake (art) (1972): Mouse hilarity. Incredible art.

For Families that Love & Love & Love on Each Other

Kamau and Zuzu Find a Way by Aracelis Girmay (words) & Diana Ejaita (art) (2024): A soft, loving, heartbreaking story about distance and diaspora and love and magic and loss and home. I was stunned by the gentle whimsy, the deep love, the ache, the truth, the layers. The art is gorgeous. 100/10, no notes.

Butterfly Child by Marc Majewski (2022): Exuberant and beautiful and bursting with flowers.

My Rainbow by Deshanna Neal & Trinity Neal (words) & Art Twink (art) (2020): This is about a trans girl who is really upset because she wants long hair. When she tells her mom that she needs long hair, that she requires it to feel like herself, her family rallies to help her get it. It takes a trip to the beauty store, and some creativity, but OH WOW DO THEY COME THROUGH.

When Aidan Became a Brother by Kyle Lukoff (words) & Kaylani Juanita (art) (2019): This book is about the absolute privilege and honor it is to have a trans kid in your family. It’s about the gifts queer and trans people bring to their families and loved ones.

The Coolest Beard by Betty Tekle (words) & Nicholas Alexander (art) (2023): A hilarious and heartwarming book about a boy who wants a beard just like his dad’s. The dad in this book is A+++.

Grandmother’s Pigeon by Louise Erdrich (words) & Jim LaMarche (art) (1996): A mysterious story about freedom and wonder and what we owe the earth and the creatures we share it with. This writing is so soft, and so are the drawings. There’s a sheen to them, all muted colors bathed in light.

For (Queer) Friendship

In a Jar by Deborah Marcero (2020): This book is pure magic, pure whimsy. It’s about a rabbit named Llewellyn who collects things in jars: leaves, sticks, sunsets, seasons. One day he’s out collecting and he meets another rabbit named Evelyn, and since he has an extra jar of sunset, he gives it to her, and they become besties.

Swashby and the Sea by Beth Ferry (words) & Juana Martinez-Neal (art) (2020): Oh, I giggled. I smiled. I chortled. Charming, heartfelt, full of the ocean. No notes.

The Ghosts’ Trip to Loch Ness by Jacques Duquennoy, tr. Kathryn Nanovic (1996): I cannot explain how much I love this very queer book about three ghosts who take a vacation to Scotland to search for Nessie.

Small Things Mended by Casey W. Robinson (Words) & Nancy Whitesides (art) (2024): Oh, my heart. This is a perfect book. It’s so sad in the heart-full way that being a human is sad. It’s about how good it feels to help people. I cried.

Birdsong by Julie Flett (2019): A quiet, moving friendship story about a girl and her elderly neighbor. There aren’t a lot of words. But there’s something in the beautiful simplicity of the illustrations that radiates love.

For Incredible Author’s Notes (But the Books are Great, Too)

Maples in the Mist by Minfong Ho (translations) & Jean Tseng & Mou-Sien Tseng (art) (1996): Could there be a picture book that includes more of the things I love than this one? I don’t know. It begins with an incredible note from Minfong Ho about why she deiced to translate these poems, and it just keeps getting better.

Kapaemahu by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, & Joe Wilson (words) & Daniel Sousa (art) (2022): This is a gorgeous bilingual retelling (and story about) the Native Hawaiian moolelo of The Healer Stones of Kapaemahu. I loved everything about it. The gentle story of healing and community and magic. The fiery art, full of swirling colors. The defiance and resistance etched into the pages.

Something About the Sky by Rachel Carson (words) & Nikki McClure (art) (2024): The text of this beautiful book comes from the transcript of a short feature Rachel Carson did about clouds and the sky in 1956. Nikki McClure illustrates these words with gorgeous, sweeping, floating, wispy, wild illustrations of clouds and the sky and the earth and the ocean. A magical collaboration.

For Getting What You Need

The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld (2018): What happens in this book is in the title: a bad thing happens and Taylor gets upset. A whole string of animals come along to offer their solutions, none of which Taylor wants. But the rabbit listens. Which is what Taylor needs. I absolutely cried.

Exactly as Planned by Tao Nyeu (2024): I read three Tao Nyeu books this year and choosing just one for this list was nearly impossible. But this one is maybe the most perfect? Nyeu is a marvel.

The Puddle Pail by Elisa Kleven (1997): Sol and Ernst are crocodile brothers. Sol loves to collect things. Ernst loves to make things. when Ernst tries collecting, it’s all wonder and whimsy and joy. Also: the colors!!

For Getting Free

From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea by Kai Cheng Thom (words) & Kai Yun Ching & Wai-Yant Li (art) (2017): The sweetest, softest, wildest, most lovely book about being who you are and changing who you are.

47,000 Beads by Koja Adeyoha & Angel Adeyoha (words) & Holly McGillis (art) (2017): This is such a soft and beautiful book about a Lakota kid whose family and community come together to help her find a way to feel good about dancing at powwwow.

The Big Bath House by Kyo Maclear (words) & Gracey Zhang (art) (2021): Oh my heart, nobody told me this was a big, glorious, intergenerational celebration of naked bodies of all shapes and sizes!

Bodies are Cool by Tyler Feder (2021): Bodies are wildly cool! I mean, they’re complicated and fraught and can cause a lot of pain. And. They. Are. So. Cool. I love that this is the refrain of this joyful rhyming book—not that bodies are beautiful (though bodies are!), but that bodies are cool.

For Crying

The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden by Heather Smith (words) & Rachel Wada (art) (2019): I can’t explain how profoundly moving this book is. It’s based on a true story about a man who built a phone booth in his garden with a disconnected phone in it, which he used to talk to someone he loved who’d died. When the 2011 tsunami struck his town, Otsuchi, people began using the phone booth to talk to everyone they’d lost.

A Walk in the Woods by Nikki Grimes (words) & Jerry Pinkney, Brian Pinkney (art) (2023): What a stunning book. A boy is grieving the death of his father. He finds an envelope his dad left him with a map of the woods behind their house. So he sets off into the woods. It’s hard to explain the magic of this story. The quiet of the forest, the deeply felt presence of the father, the blend of comfort and sadness, grief and magic, loss and beauty. Also, the art: wowwowwow.

The Mountain That Loved a Bird by Alice McLerran (words) & Eric Carle (art) (1985): I’ve been reading one Eric Carle book a month for most of this year and this is my favorite.

For Art that Opens Worlds

How the Stars Came to Be by Poonam Mistry (2020): This is a beautiful retelling of a myth about how the stars came to be. The story is lovely; the art is extraordinary. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to explain how incredible it is, and I don’t know how to do it. The illustrations are made up of all these tiny patterns—dots, stars, lines, leaves, rows of stripes and rays and beads. It makes the whole book feel like a field of light, shattered and refracted light, a thousand kinds of starlight. Exquisite.

Dream Street by Tricia Elam Walker (words) & Ekua Holmes (art) (2021): Ekua is a friend of my mom’s, and I adore her art (I have one of her prints in my house) but this is the first picture I’ve read that she illustrated and WOW. It’s about a street in a city, Dream Street, and the people who live on it. Every page introduces a different character, along with their dreams and how they are living them out. These little character studies are accompanied by Ekua’s absolutely stunning collages. Each one is a portrait, and even though there is only a paragraph of text about each person, the portraits feel like they capture the essence of these made-up people.

The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander (words) & Kadir Nelson (art) (2019): This is a love letter to Black America, and it’ s also an elegy, a mourning song. I’m always thinking about what picture books do, about the particular form and structure of them that makes a story come alive, and this is a book that uses that form to do something extraordinary.

There Was a Party for Langston by Jason Reynolds (words) & Jerome Pumphrey & Jarrett Pumphrey (art) (2023): This book is not only a celebration of Hughes, and of Black authors and artists, but of words themselves—their physicality, music, power, and beauty.

Anno’s Journey by Mitsumasa Anno (1977): What an amazing wordless book! Anno sets off on a journey, traveling on his donkey through a European landscape. Visually, it’s stunning. There is so much happening on every page—dozens of tiny stories.

For Celebrating Artists Who Make the World Bigger

Everywhere Beauty is Harlem by Gary Golio (words) & E.B. Lewis (art) (2024): This book is gorgeous. It’s not really a biography—instead, the book follows along as Roy DeCarava walks around Harlem after work snapping photos. I love this approach—it’s so immediate. It makes it feel like we’re right there with him, seeing what he sees, noticing the different kinds of light, the way people move, the expressions on their faces.

It Began with a Page by Kyo Maclear (words) & Julie Morstad (art) (2019): A beautiful, moving picture book biography of Gyo Fujikawa, one of the first America artists to draw children of different races in picture books. I love her work and I love this book.

A Tulip in Winter by Kathy Stinson (words) & Lauren Soloy (art) (2023): Maud Lewis was a disabled artist who painted and painted and painted in a tiny house in Nova Scotia. She painted canvases, but also the windows and doors and stairs of her house. Her joy in painting comes through so beautifully, in the words and also in the wonderful, bright, inviting art.

Jimmy’s Rhythm and Blues by Michelle Meadows (words) & Jamiel Law (art) (2024): Baldwin is such a giant, his life so expansive and complicated—how do you write a picture book about him? Meadows does so by staying true to Baldwin’s vision, writing about his anger, passion, strength, exhaustion, sadness, achievements, friendships, traumas, loves.

For the Love of Winter

Snowsong Whistling by Karen Elisa Lotz (words) & Elisa Kleven (art) (1997): Every so often I read a picture book and it just clicks, it’s written for me, it immediately becomes part of the language of my heart. This book is that. It’s a poem that moves, slowly, from fall into winter. Absolutely astonishing.

Winter Dance by Marion Dane Bauer (words) & Richard Jones (art) (2017): One of the best winter books I’ve read yet. A repeating pattern! All the different animals! The inquisitive fox with all his wonderful facial expressions! Perfection.

Skating Wild on an Inland Sea by Jean E. Pendziwol (words) & Todd Stewart (art) (2023): The simplest, softest, most wintery quiet story about two kids who wake up early on a cold morning to go skating on Lake Superior. The colors, the ice, the bare branches, the poetry. All the superlatives. The most beautiful winter song. Love, love, love. incandescent winter love.

Tracks in the Snow by Wong Herbert Lee (2003): Some perfect things about this book include the tracks, the snow, the little girl’s coat and scarf, and also the tracks.

For the Love of Nature

Slow Down by Rachel Williams (words) & Freya Hartas (art) (2020): A stunning collection of little nature stories! Each story is a two-page comic about a simple but extraordinary moment that happens in the natural world: a sparrow taking a bath, mushrooms growing, an ocean wave forming, leaves changing, a fox eating berries.

Berry Song by Michaela Goade (2022): A Tlingit girl and her grandmother go walking around the Tongass National Forest in Alaska where they live (and where Goade lives, and where the Tlingit people have lived for generations upon generations), picking berries and sharing stories. I turned the pages as slowly as I could, reveling in their beauty.

Mushrooms Know by Kallie George (words) & Sara Gillingham (art) (2024): An absolutely delightful book about mushrooms, and what they know—which is a lot! The illustrations are bright and silly and so creative. All the mushrooms have little faces, which is adorable, but they are also clearly specific kinds of mushrooms. I love this kind of drawing—not completely scientific or fanciful, but something in between.

Swirl by Swirl by Joyce Sidman (words) & Beth Krommes (art) (2011): I struggled to pick just one Joyce Sidman book—you cannot go wrong with her! This is a joyful celebration of spirals in nature—millipedes and sunflowers, seahorses and ferns, the trunks of elephants and the tails of monkeys, shells and waves and tendrils.

Around the World in 80 Trees by Ben Lerwill (words) & Kaja Kajfez (art) (2022): One thing about me is that I love trees THE MOST. This book is basically just a celebration of trees and how amazing they are. It highlights SO MANY different kinds of trees, from all over the world, all with wildly different growing habits. A stunner.

For the Love of Water

Umbrella by Taro Yashima (1958): What a grey and splashing celebration of one of the best things in the world: rain! Its music, its colors, what it feels like to walk down a city street under it, protected by an umbrella.

When You Can Swim by Jack Wong (2023): An ode to water and wild swimming. This book is a part of me now. It’s special.

Water is Water by Miranda Paul (words) & Jason Chin (art) (2015): I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so enchanted by this book. But give me a perfectly executed pattern and delicious language (”Slosh in galoshes” is a joy) and I will fall in love. Which I did.

Benjamin’s Thunderstorm by Melanie Florence (words) & Hawlii Pichette (art) (2023): A Cree boy loves thunder, and revels in rain, and finds connection and meaning and love and poetry in his culture’s rain stories and traditions. Perfect.

Wet World by Norma Simon (words) & Alexi Natchev (art) (1954): This book is glorious. A little rain love song. A girl wakes up to a wet world and goes out into it. Wet street, wet buildings, wet ground. Eventually she comes back inside to a warm world: warm parents, warm bed.

For Rhyme & Rhythm

My Fade is Fresh by Shauntay Grant (words) & Kitt Thomas (art) (2022): I really cannot explain the perfection of this poem. The rhymes! The meter! It’s all SO DELICIOUS. It’s begging to be SUNG! To be SHOUTED! To be STOMPED! It is language joy and Black hair joy, and it all flies off the page

Out of Wonder by Kwame Alexander, Chris Colderley, & Marjory Wentworth (words) & Ekua Holmes (art) (2017): Wow, wow, wow, wow. A collection of poems celebrating poets?! Yes please! Incredible collage art?! ALSO YES.

Snowman - Cold = Puddle by Laura Purdie Salas (words) & Micha Archer (art) (2019): A book of spring poems in the form of equations. I love this book with my whole soul. For serious. Heartbeat + language = wild. Book + window = delight. Wowie.

Snippy and Snappy by Wanda Gág (1931): This is an utterly charming story about Snippy and Snappy, two field mice who live with their parents in a cozy nook in a hay field. This is a book my aunt recommended, one she remembers reading from her childhood, and it’s such a delight to me that it holds up. I was riveted, amused, entertained. I’m officially a Wanda Gág fan.

The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish Swish Swish by Lil Miss Hot Mess (words) & Olga de Dios Ruiz (art) (2020): Extravagantly joyful! A no-holds-barred celebration! A poetic triumph!

The Boy and the Bindi by Vivek Shraya (words) & Rajini Perera (art) (2019): Did I cry? Yes. Could I read books about parents loving their queer children abundantly and ferociously forever? Yes. This book gave me a feeling of endless possibility, queer magic, and loving play.

For Becoming Gloriously Weird & A Bit Mysterious

Mushroom in the Rain by Mirra Ginsburg (words) & José Aruego & Ariane Dewey (art) (1974): What a weird little gem from the 1970s. It’s adapted from a Russian story, a version of the classic “there’s no room!” folktale. It’s perfect.

Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper (1998): What a life! Living in a super cozy pumpkin-shaped cabin in the woods, singing and making soup and snuggling with your pals! 100/10, no notes.

You Can’t be Too Careful by Roger Mello, tr. Daniel Hahn (2008): Every page in this book about unexpected and unseen consequences is its own world. Everything is connected. Small moments change lives. It’s a fable and a poem. The art is extraordinary.

For So Many Laughs

Creepy Carrots! by Aaron Reynolds (words) & Peter Brown (art) (2012): This is a truly perfect Halloween book. I cackled the whole way through and then I cackled even more at the end. Full on full-throated laughing out loud. The tone is perfect. The illustrations feel like something out of a classic horror movie, in shades of black and white, but they’re also hilarious and whimsical. The creepy carrots are winking at you.

Bathe the Cat by Alice B. McGinty (words) & David Roberts (art) (2021): Rhyme? Yes. A very sly and tricksy cat? Yes. The hilarious phrase, “Sarah, Bob the mat!” YES. Charmingly bewildered family members? This also. A dinosaur costume because WHY NOT? Oh, yes. Gay? YES! So many pink pants?! ALSO YES! 1000/10, no notes.

100 Mighty Dragons All Named Broccoli by David LaRochelle (words) & Lian Cho (art) (2023): This book is why I love picture books. 100 mighty dragons all named Broccoli? I mean! Who comes up with stuff like this! I laughed my way through this whole ridiculous counting book and then I laughed some more.

The Book That Almost Rhymed by Omar Abed (words) & Hatem Aly (art) (2024): Most things in the world are complicated. What is not complicated is the pleasure of reading this book. Reading this book is perhaps one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences I have ever had in my life

Mr. Watson’s Chickens by Jarrett Dapier (words) & Andrea Tsurumi (art) (2021): I cannot remember the last time a book made me laugh so hard. I straight-up belly laughed the whole way through. Could not stop. Almost peed myself. Still laughing.

Knight Owl by Christopher Denise (2022): Knight Owl forever and ever amen. I read this on my own, and then I read it again with my best friend, and then she took it home to read to her sweetie, and guess what: everyone loved it.

There’s No Such Thing as Vegetables by Kyle Lukoff (words) & Andrea Tsurumi (art) (2024): Wait for it…another perfect book! I could not stop laughing. Pure delight. Hilarity, whimsy, wisdom. Vegetables with a lot to say. 100/10. No notes.

For Endless Whimsy

Chirri & Chirra by Kaya Doi, tr. Yuki Kaneko & David Boyd: There are eight volumes of Chirri & Chirra, and I have read seven. I can’t bring myself to read the last one yet. I do not want them to be over. They celebrate snow and rain and bicycles and the sea and treats and sisterhood and weirdness and they are wonderful and perfect.

Sato the Rabbit by Yuki Ainoya, tr. Michael Blaskowsky: Three perfect books. I cannot even tell you how perfect. There are window puddles and giant raspberries and seas of tea and bits of the moon and I just. Sato forever and ever amen.

For Simple Joy

Freight Train by Donald Crews (1978): A rainbow freight train zooms down the tracks. That’s it. There are almost no words. The pictures are perfect. I read it twice. I was delighted.

You Hold Me Up by Monique Gray Smith (Words) & Danielle Daniel (art) (2017): A whole book about all the ways that people hold each other up. There are only a few words on each page. “You hold me up when you are kind to me,” it begins, and goes on from there.

Over in the Meadow by John Langstaff (words) & Feodor Rojankovsky (art) (1957): I was not expecting to be so taken with this old song in book form. I mean, it’s a repeating structure, and it rhymes, and we know how much I love those things, but the actual content of this simple song—how much it moved me—took me by surprise.

For Pure Wonder

The Little Band by James Sage (words) & Keiko Narahashi (art) (1991): This is a book of wordless wonderment. Unexplained beauty. Unlooked for imagination. It’s a book about unasked questions without answers. The little band is a mystery. The mystery is the wonder. They profoundly change everyone in the town. They do not explain themselves. They are too busy making music. I cannot explain how much I love this book. I think about it constantly.

What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses? by Richard Van Camp (words) & George Littlechild (art) (1998): It’s 40 below in Richard Van Camp’s hometown of Fort Smith, Canada. There are no horses around and his people, who belong to the Dogrib Nation, are not horse people. But he decides he wants to know all about horses anyway. He has some questions for horses, such as: “Do horses think fireworks are strange flowers blooming in the sky?” He can’t ask horses, so he decides instead to ask his friends and family: “What’s the most beautiful thing you know about horses?” A magic poem of a book.

A is for Bee by Ellen Heck (2022): This is an animal alphabet book where each letter is represented by a non-English word. So ‘e’ is for snail, because the words for snail in Chechen, French, Finnish, and Cherokee all start with an e sound. Language is my first love, and this is a love letter to language. I love it with the fire of a thousand suns.

And Then It’s Spring by Julie Fogilano (words) & Erin E. Stead (art) (2012): I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that gets spring so right. It follows a boy through the weeks after he plants some seeds, waiting and waiting for them to sprout. It opens like this: “First you have brown, all around you have brown.” Swooning.

For My Queer Heart Forever and Ever Amen

Guji Guji by Chih-Yuan Chen (2004): This is a story about knowing who you are and who you belong to, even when you aren’t exactly like the people you belong to. I could not love it more if I tried. It lives inside me now.

Do Not Open by Brinton Turkle (1981): Buckle up, I have a new favorite lesbian in fiction. I am besotted. Do I want to be her or do I want to live with her and her cat Captain Kidd in a house by the sea? Maybe both. I suppose this is what people call a “queer-coded” book, which I find hilarious and silly, because it’s just so obvious. Miss Moody is a big dyke. Throw her a party. This book is a joy, start to finish, an absolute delight. 1000/10, no notes.

Mrs. Biddlebox by Linda Smith (words) & Marla Frazee (art) (2002): I cannot turn my love of this book into a snippet. It means everything to me. If one book encapsulates the way reading picture books has changed how I think about literature, it’s this one.

For My Poem-Making Heart Forever and Ever Amen

The Bat-Poet by Randall Jarrell (words) & Maurice Sendak (art) (1964): I read this book in August and still haven’t posted a review of it because how can I explain how much it means to me? I picked it up because Carl Phillips mentioned, in one of his nonfiction books, how much he loved it as a kid. I can understand why. It’s magic. It’s also not really a picture book—it’s 40 pages of text with gorgeous little black and white drawings of the woods at night.

It’s a story about a bat poet—oh, little brown bat, heart of my heart!—but mostly it’s about being an artist, about feeling called to translate some part of the world into words. It’s about the wonder and mystery of making poems, the loneliness and connection of it. It’s about the whys and weird who-knows of making poems. This book captures what it feels like to make a poem better than any other book I’ve ever read. The rush and quiet of it, the shiver of it, the ghost of it, the longing of it. I will cherish this book forever.

WOW YOU MADE IT ALL THE WAY DOWN HERE! You know I want to hear about the picture books you love in the comments.