DINO POET

Reluctant to be eaten, a froggy Triadobatrachus gives a toothy, literary-minded Coelophysis some basic schooling in the art and craft of poetry.

Angleberger’s cartoons, drawn on raggedly torn squares arranged as panels on brown paper backdrops, lend rough-and-ready energy to the amphibian’s desperate efforts to distract its hungry, versifying attacker. “Don’t chase me…chase life!” The little green lecturer notes that sticking to accurate facts and genuine feelings will lead to better writing. So will avoiding “lazy” rhymes like eat and meat. The frog also suggests practicing short forms like a limerick or a “speed haiku” and, just for fun, composing “poo-etry” on some topic gross enough to, coincidentally, kill one’s appetite. The predator poet records steadily improving verses in a small notebook. All the while, fraught encounters with even larger dinos and a side trip to the “pen tree” for a ripe new pen supply plenty of action, silly and otherwise, on the way to an amicable literary partnership. (“Well,” says the nervous narrator of the tree, stepping out of character for a moment, “where did you think he was going to get a pen? Walmart?”) Budding poets in our own Cenozoic era will also find these simple prehistoric precepts and exercises helpful first steps.

A solid bit of instruction, delivered amid much Triassic tomfoolery.