Poem-mobiles: Crazy Car Poems

Lewis and Florian bring new meaning to “hybrid automobile” in clever and concise poems packed with wordplay, puns, and double entendre. An impish array of people, monsters, and animals inhabit a loony, on-the-go world with such exotic vehicular mashups as the Fish Car, High-Heel Car, Balloon Car, and Caterpillar Cab. Holmes’s spry, mixed-media illustrations in lime greens, pinks, and metallic tones have a smooth, almost taffylike veneer, and handily match the witty and wondrous mood of the poems. Where the poets envision a post–fossil fuel automobile (“Here’s what we will be driving/ When oil and gasoline/ Are just a distant memory—/ The family li-mooo-sine”), he pictures a cow-drawn station wagon in a futuristic farmscape where a sheep peers at a neighboring farm planet through a giant telescope. A birdlike royal rides in the Bathtub Car, an ornate chariot chauffeured by a duckling: “With hot-water heating/ And porcelain seating,/ The Bathtub is speeding.” It’s all but sure to have readers dreaming up their own wild contraptions for land, sea, sky, and space. Ages 4–8. Illustrator’s agent: Rebecca Sherman, Writers House. (Jan.)