My Dog is a Carrot

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A delightful collection of quirky poems by one of this country's most popular poets.Enter the celebrated poet's weird, witty, bespectacled world and meet the organic leek who has learned to speak, the octopus who gets a nasty shocktopus, the man who drew his cornflakes and a whole cast of other interesting characters. Surprising, serious, and sometimes just plain silly, this is a collection of poems even your dog might like. Unless your dog is a carrot too.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

British comic Hegley composes nearly 50 eccentric poems about cornflakes, bullies and other seemingly unrelated topics. All his poems rely on surprise, whether in terms of events or skewed, stuttering meter. The free-verse "Grandad's Glasses," for instance, may blindside readers: "one day/ he couldn't see TV anymore/ so he didn't need his glasses/ and there was no point in burying them with him." Wry first-person poems describe a darkly amusing childhood. In "A Boy's Best Gift," a boy begs his father for a dog and gets an empty kennel ("I crawled inside and became the very dog I had requested./ I became my own best friend"). Later, a carrot-shaped concrete poem appears in yellow print on an orange page ("I've got a dog that's more/ like a carrot than a dog/.../ and it's all/ orange/ and/ crunchy"), and the volume's final poem, "My dog is a dog," suggests a happy ending for the speaker. While a few crude line drawings adorn the margins, multicolored pages and bold layouts stand in for illustration. Although Hegley's verses at times come across as nonsense, with their absurd humor ("Me Poem" consists of the word "me," in various sizes) and unpredictable wordplay ("the octopus got a nasty electric shocktopus/ and had to call the octodoctopus"), along the way these peculiar pieces provide serious insight into a contentious family life; even the silly title takes on meaning. This experimental work is not to every taste, but dogged readers will warm to it. Ages 6-up. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

Gr 4-6-This British songwriter with a background in children's theater creatively plays with language in 49 short poems. Topics include pets, eyeglasses, kissing, school, and family. Blank verse dominates, but a few concrete poems and an acrostic add interest to the collection. Comic line drawings and occasional, brilliant splashes of plaid, pink, orange, or blue pump up the visual interest. The wit sashays from droll ("A comparison of logs and dogs": "both are very popular at Christmas/but it is not generally considered cruel/to abandon a log/and dogs are rarely used as fuel") to simply odd ("Loaf poem": "I bought a loaf the other day/it came to life and ran away./And I said,/`Naughty bad bread./NAUGHTY'"). Offer this title to readers pleased with wordplay and to those with an ability to appreciate unusual humor.-Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Gr. 3^-6. A British comedian and author of several adult books, Hegley offers an unusual collection of nonsense for young people. Printed on brightly colored pages, the mostly rhyming poems are often skewed, whimsical verses about everyday things: glasses, keys, trees, carrots. Several selections seem off-target for a young audience. In one, Hegley offers a formula for fitting elephants into a car. It's an appealing idea, but the words and images are oddly sophisticated. And there are several bizarre poems about family life that are abrupt, disturbing revelations: in one short, bouncing rhyme, a kid appreciates his dad, but realizes that his mother doesn't; in another, the speaker tries to keep his father from pouring jelly into a mailbox for unexplained reasons. What's best here are the lines of sheer, irresistible silliness. In "Bee Poem," the buzzing speaker says, "I live in a colony. / I like to get all polleny." Teachers will like the range of accessible styles--including acrostic and concrete poems--and Hegley's small, childlike sketches are a good match for the words. A puzzling, uneven collection, but the selections that work are memorable. --Gillian Engberg

Horn Book Review

Hegley offers a smorgasbord of unconventional poems, a number of which are inexplicably about eyewear and dogs. Bees and fleas and cups of tea and a variety of relatives are other subjects. Varying type styles and sizes, pages blocked with retro color, and a scattering of line drawings lend a hip sensibility. Some readers will be put off by the whimsy; others may be inspired to make their own flights of fancy--and weirdness--take wing. From HORN BOOK Fall 2003, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

"EEEEEEEK! Poetry!" squeaks the dismayed dog on the cover. Readers who aren't scared off by the warning will find within an entertaining, if uneven, array of free verse and shaped poetry selected from Glad to Wear Glasses (1990). Hegley writes of eyeglasses, dogs (including one with an alimentary problem), carrots, colors, and various other quirky topics, usually in a jocular tone but occasionally waxing earnest, as in "Bully For You": "If you're being bullied, / tell. / Tell your parents / tell your guardians / tell your caregivers." The page design adds to the free-form spirit, with vivid color changes playing off each other on facing texts or backgrounds, abstract geometric shapes alongside or behind the lines, and occasional childlike cartoons. Despite some duds, like "Loaf Poem" ("I bought a loaf the other day / it came to life and ran away. / And I said, / 'Naughty bad bread. / Naughty' "), this is worth considering for deeper collections where such sparklers as Paul Janeczko's A Poke in the I (2001) have created new interest in concrete poetry. (Poetry. 8-10) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.