By Shel Silverstein
The collection where Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout won't take the garbage out until it swallows the whole town, and reading it feels less like poetry than like getting away with something.
The reputation is earned: this is the one that wins over a child who has decided poetry is boring. Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout refuses to take the garbage out until it fills the whole town and does her in. Peggy Ann McKay wakes up with the measles, the mumps, a gash, a rash, and about sixteen more complaints, all of which vanish the second she remembers it's Saturday. A boa constrictor eats somebody an inch at a time. The poems are short, most are funny, plenty are just a little rude, and Shel Silverstein's own scratchy drawings share the page so it never reads as a wall of words. Open it anywhere and you're laughing inside four lines.
For a lot of children this is the book that undoes the idea that poetry is homework. Nothing in it asks to be studied. The poems are tiny, they rhyme hard, they're funny or gross or a little bit wicked, and the drawings carry half the load, so a reluctant reader gets the reward almost before they've committed to reading. You dip in anywhere and each poem is over in a breath, which suits the ten minutes a bedtime actually has instead of demanding a whole chapter. Mine treated it like a dare and kept turning pages to see how far Silverstein would go.