Eicheldinger, Matthew. Holes in My Underwear: Over 100 Poems That Will Knock Your Socks OffE ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
The author's note about why he wrote these poems is very informative. His students didn't like the poetry that they had to read for class, so in order to interest them, he tried his own hand at writing poems for them. This is an admirable idea. He teachers 6th grade, so thematically, these address a lot of concerns about farts, sports, and generally goofiness. Also a good call.
While I have definitely seen the same reactions to poetry from my students, I'm SUPER, SUPER picky about how poems are written. I write poems myself. It can take me weeks to get a poem just right; I'm a huge fan of the work of Timothy Steele, and adored his book on how to write poetry, All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing. Getting just the right word, making sure the scansion is absolutely flawless, using assonance and consonance... sigh. Writing poetry is my retirement plan.
While everyone can try to write poetry, and sometimes write decent verse, not all of it is good. Eicheldinger's work is serviceable. It's got decent enough themes, the rhyme is okay, the meter is sometimes better than others. I'm wondering how he teachers his 6th graders about poetry, and whether or not his poems meet all of the criteria; when poetry was included in our 7th grade curriculum (it now isn't anywhere), there were a lot of types of figurative language that students had to find in collections of poems, and I'm not sure this book would have been useful.
It's entirely likely that 6th graders will read this and find it funny. I still have a small collection of poetry books in my library, but I'm not buying any more, since they are used very little. If I were to purchase more, I would get Schecter's The Red Ear Blows Its Nose, which was very clever, but had a horrible cover. Viorst's What Are You Mad About? What Are You Glad About?, Dean Koontz's The Paper Doorway, and anything by Naomi Shihab Nye, J. Patrick Lewis, and Jack Prelutsky are also good choices.
This author also wrote the goofy Matt Sprouts series and a memoir about his experiences in education, but I was not aware of this bestselling author at all.
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