Award-winning poet Jack Prelutsky loves to collect things: he shares his pad with 3,000 frog figurines! "Frogs always have these little grins on their faces," he says. For his latest collection, a book of poems called The Beauty of the Beast (Knopf), Prelutsky gathered more than 200 odes to frogs and other animals by famous and not-so-famous poets. He also sprinkled in a few haiku of his own. Artist Meilo So's brilliant illustrations of nature's creatures march along in the parade.
Fans of Prelutsky's poems are used to gobbling up goofier fare, like A Pizza the Size of the Sun. But he bets they will treasure this book as much as he does: "I hope kids see how much beauty and wonder there is in nature."