Poem

POEM is an enhanced picture book for readers aged eight to eighty. It is not, as most such books are, an anthology of complete poems or an illustrated edition of a single poem. Rather, the text of POEM is what is known as a cento: it stitches together lines and phrases of famous poems to form an entirely new, and itself poetic, whole. The result is something like a pastiche introduction to the conventions of poetry-its sounds, images, aims, and rhythms-in which the words of the text illustrate the aspect of poetry that is being presented.