RANDOM BODY PARTS

Poetry + anatomy and physiology = an unusual combination.

Bulion has taken a series of poetry styles—sonnet, limerick, haiku, concrete poem, cinquain—as well as various rhyming schemes and uses them to provide brief, riddlelike descriptions of various organs of the human body. Although the first poem tells readers, “Some riddles will seem cinchy, / Some challengingly tough,” the answers are revealed on the same pages as the poems appear, making the guessing quite simple all the way through. Some of the spreads include humorous, cartoony illustrations, while others feature close-up or even microscopic photographic images, none of which are explicitly identified. Detailed “Poetry Notes” provide useful explanations of the styles and rhyming patterns of the poems. She relates each of them to the works of Shakespeare, although the audience that might most enjoy the hyperbole of the poems and images and the riddle format is unlikely to have yet acquired much knowledge of the Bard. The poem on teeth says, “A full set’s eight and twenty more,” although the explanation at the bottom of the page correctly identifies the number of permanent teeth as 32. While it’s hard not to admire the ick factor of couplets like, “Spuds unearthed from mud, then fried, / Mucus oozed from deep inside,” to describe the workings of the stomach, the audience for this effort may be limited.

Better suited to poetry classrooms than science labs.