I Love You, Nose! I Love You, Toes!

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” for the preschool set? Perhaps not, but one hopes that the “poet of democracy” would have gotten a kick out of rhymes like “I love you nose,/ though there’s no doubt/ that when you sneeze/ some stuff comes out.” Illustrator Davick, in her first outing as author, leaves no body part uncelebrated; her rambunctious, roundheaded kids and succinct, just-wry-enough couplets also cover nipples (“east and west”) and “the parts that my friends don’t see/ the parts that poop, the parts that pee.” With generously scaled, dramatically cropped compositions and a cheery schoolroom palette, Davick makes every page-turn a surprise and a renewed invitation to join the lovefest. In one of the cleverest spreads, a celebration of hair shows four sets of round eyes peering at one another, with two longhaired kids hanging upside and two with shorter ’dos peeking up from the bottom of the frame. The unalloyed wonder and delight that animate these pages is like a breath of fresh air—and should win over the most reticent audiences. Ages 2–7. Agent: East West Literary Agency. (Apr.)