Your Skeleton Is Showing: Rhymes of Blunder From Six Feet Under

A boy with ruby locks tours a graveyard, glimpsing the sinister circumstances behind each resident’s death. Pictures and poems don’t beat around the gravestone: “Freddie picked his nose and now he’s dead, dead, dead./ He picked and picked and picked until it bled, bled, bled.” The death of a character from a familiar rhyme is unveiled with acerbic humor: “Hoofprints. Feathers. Piles of dung!/ Who is laid below?/ Mysterious letters mark the stone:/ EIEIO.” Both Cyrus’s cerebral verses and Scrambly’s wide-eyed cadavers have a bit of an Edward Gorey–meets–Shel Silverstein vibe. Readers who prefer scary costumes should welcome this grisly portrait of strange (and eternal) bedfellows. Ages 3–7. Agent: Michael Stearns, Upstart Crow Literary. (July)