Poetry: It’s a Whole Thing. That’s my new tagline for it. And while it doesn’t carry the same emotional baggage as, say, children’s books about math, there’s still a swath of English majors out there who had terrible teachers who did poetry dirty. Your job? Don’t let the cycle continue. You must imbue in children a love of poetry from the get-go, and you must make it stick. Now you can give them Shel Silverstein all day long, but poetry is a wide range of forms and styles. Better that you give them the best of the best of the best coming out today, yes? Well, I’ve good news for you. I located it, cataloged it, and am now presenting it to you. Think of it as an early Christmas gift. Y’welcome.

Oh, and if you’d like today’s list in the form of a PDF, you may download it here.

Interested in previous years’ poetry? Then check out these beauties:

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016

2025 Children’s Poetry

FEATURED TITLE

Black Diamond Kings by Charles R. Smith Jr., ill. Adrian Brandon

Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Smokey Williams, all the great players of the Negro leagues are on display with vibrant, bat-cracking poems and eye-popping visuals to match! Why Charles R. Smith Jr. isn’t better known as one of our top children’s poets right now, I dunno. Seems like the man is so consistently good at what he does that it astounds. By all rights this book should be boring. At least I have a tendency to get a little bored by collected biographies, even if they are done poetically. But Smith just knows how to make every single one of these guys stand out. My favorite, no question, is “Fast As What?” which is about James “Cool Papa” Bell and is told like a series of tall tales and brags. I love how Smith constantly shakes it up with the different kinds of poems Meanwhile, the art of Adrian Brandon is fascinating. The style seems to shift from man to man (the one I would want on a poster is definitely Smokey Joe Williams holding that flaming baseball in his hand). And, as I am perpetually on the search for sports books at all times, I cannot help but point out that little detail as well. Incredible stuff.

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The Book of Candles: Eight Poems for Hanukkah by Laurel Snyder, ill. Leanne Hatch

[Previously seen on the Holiday List]

There is much to be said for a poem picture book that determines its sense of place from the first two-page spread onward. Just after the title page, we are presented with a wordless scenario in which a family prepares for Hanukkah. The scene, in fact, is so realistic that you can practically smell the potatoes being grated and the heat of the hairdryer dad’s using to work on the menorah over the sink. We then move immediately into the poems and they are… good? No. Not “good”. Absurdly good. This is the kind of book you pick up off-handedly, expecting it to be decent, only to find that the poetry within transcends the ordinary. Look, I’ll just spell it out. There’s a poem for every night, but there are also little sidebars of information (“Did you know that unlike Shabbat candles, which should be lit before sundown, you can light Hanukkah candles late into the night, so long as everyone is awake to see them burn?”). But the whole reason I felt such kinship with this book had much to do with the easy, cozy, everyday contemporary family feel. At one point on the third night everyone comes home with a takeout pizza. This is a family that you grow to know and love throughout the pages, and that has as much to do with the author’s poems as it does the illustrator’s pictures. And yes. If you’re wondering, “That sounds great, Betsy, but is there a banana menorah in this book?” The answer is yes. It is part of the 2025 banana menorah trend. 

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The Boy Who Lived in a Shell: Snippets for Wandering Minds by John Himmelman

Once there was a boy named Ivo who lived in a giant moon snail shell on a beach. Read the poems he writes on the wall of the shell, in this ribald, witty, and occasional touching collection. Okay, I don’t even know how to predict what John Himmelman is going to do next anymore. When I was first starting out as a children’s librarian he was known primarily for picture books like the incredible, fantastic, and never-to-be-forgotten Katie Loves the Kittens. Then he takes some time, pivots, and does that incredible, wackadoodle early chapter book series Albert Hopper. But then I go to his website and apparently the man is also prone to doing YA and middle grade and THEN he apparently noticed that there were a couple slots empty on his bingo card, so he’s come to us with a book of poetry. And not just any poetry either. GOOD poetry. Like, high quality this-is-better-than-90%-of-kids-poetry-out-there poetry. I’m not going to say that every single poem in here is equally good, but you couldn’t say that for Shel Silverstein’s poems, for crying out loud. You’ll note the blurb from Chris Harris (My Head Has a Bellyache) on the back. That’s deserved. THIS is the poetry book of 2025 you don’t want to miss. Some of these poems will have you laughing out loud. Some will cause you to sit and think for a while. And some, like “Toby and Pip” are sad enough to warrant such concluding sentences as, “Not all stories are happy ones.”

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Dinos That Drive by Suzy Levinson, ill. Dustin Harbin

Think you know your dinos? Think again! Let this delightful array of facts, fun poetry, and cars cars cars show you what these vehicular-loving thunder lizards are all about. We’ve seen dino poetry books. And we’ve seen dino vehicle books. And I suppose at some point we probably saw a dino vehicle poetry book somewhere. That said, why is this one so good?!? It makes no sense, but this book somehow manages to have a lot going on while never feeling too busy. You have the poetry itself, rife with puns but exceedingly clever and fun. You have the art, where Mr. Harbin shows that he is just as good at doing cartoony dinos as he is realistic cars. And then you have these clever little dino facts read by our two narrators that accompany all the poems. And they’re legit GOOD facts! I thought maybe I could catch the book out on doing some outdated dino stuff, but it knows what it’s talking about (though it kinda cheats with the velociraptors, but I won’t hold that against it). Much better and interesting and funny than it has any right to be.

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Five Little Friends: A Collection of Finger Rhymes by Sean Taylor, ill. Fiona Woodcock

[Previously seen on the Rhyming Picture Books List]

Okay, maybe it isn’t quite fair for me to start everything off with a book of actual honest-to-goodness rhymes rather than a story that happens to rhyme, but this book is so good that I want to shout it to the rooftops! Warm up your digits and prepare to encounter all new finger movements for 21st century toddlers and preschoolers. Enjoy rhymes that go far beyond “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”. Now meet my new favoritest book of all the favorite books out there. I’m sorry but I cannot say enough good things about this title. First and foremost, why has it never occurred to anyone before to create original finger rhymes? As I read through this, I thought I’d run into one new one here and there, couched around old standards. Nope! Taylor manages to create new rhyme after new rhyme and They. All. Work. How is that even possible? And then to show people how to do them, he and Fiona Woodcock don’t do that pedantic thing where you put written instructions for adults in the margins. The instructions are woven seamlessly into the art itself. And the art is fantastic! About the time I got to the rhyme about swiping on your phone I was hooked and hooked hard. This isn’t just list-worthy. This is a necessary title for every library everywhere.

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How Elegant the Elephant: Poems About Animals and Insects by Mary Ann Hoberman, ill. Marla Frazee

From the bandicoot to the trilobite, delve deep into a delightful array of animal poems and poetry. And the hits just keep on coming. And to be perfectly frank there is NO reason why this book is as good as it is. By definition books that are compendiums of previous poems by a single author are almost never great. They’re well-intentioned. They’re perfectly decent. But they usually lack that kind of cohesion you need for a really good collection. The genius (and I don’t use that term lightly) of this book is the overarching idea that these animals are all checking into the same hotel. Marla Frazee, at the top of her game, then manages to weave it all together into a single miraculous entity. But that’s not even acknowledging the fact that these may be some of the best poems Hoberman ever constructed! They’re playful, clever, and cover an array of different types of poetic styles. Shockingly good.

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In the Desert by David Elliott, ill. Gordy Wright

Come to the Sahara! Meet the creatures that make this arid location their home. Clever poetry and eye-catching art combine to make clear the desert’s allure. You know, every year that David Elliott puts out one of these landscape-oriented works of poetry (be it In the Woods, At the Pond, On the Farm, In the Wild, In the Sea, or my personal favorite At the Poles) I try to tamp down my expectations. I tell myself that this new book isn’t going to be as good as the ones that came before… and then I’m proven wrong yet again! Mr. Elliott is just good at what he does. He creates poetry that is short, sweet, to the point, funny, and original. His is the BEST kind of poetry for kids unfamiliar with the form, honestly. Plenty of cool pictures (courtesy this time of one rather Scottish Gordy Wright) and loads of facts worked in there on the sly. There’s also always at least one fact that catches me by surprise. This time: The fact that dung beetles navigate by the stars. Hubba wha?

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Leaf Town Forever by Kathleen Rooney and Beth Rooney, ill. Betsy Bowen

A narrative long form picture book written entirely in haikus is the frame for this ambitious story of creation, war, and (ultimately) peace. It can be difficult to try and capture kids at play. More difficult still to put your finger down on precisely what it is that makes their imaginary worlds so special. Even Bridge to Terabithia was a novel and not a picture book, after all. Leaf Town Forever is a little different, though. Traditionally haikus have to be about an appreciation of nature. Well… in the midst of this appreciation of imagination, nature takes a starring role. In this story, kids create a small imaginary city entirely out of leaves. Unfortunately, they face internal disputes, outside forces, and more. Still, Leaf Town is forever, and that means overcoming hurdles and passing the city key on to the next generation. I don’t know why, but with its large group of independent kids, the book reminded me a lot of fellow 2025 picture book Ra! Ta! Ma! Cue! Kids these days, standing up to hatred and fear, are seeing a lot of themselves in books at the moment, that’s for sure. 

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Nightmare Jones by Shannon Bramer, ill. Cindy Derby

Creepies, crawlies, and monsters galore. If you’re looking for unsettling poetry for kids, you can’t do better than this eerie collection.  Ooo, it’s everything I’ve been waiting for since I was ten! If Stephen Gammell wasn’t going to illustrate any more Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, then clearly the next best thing is to have Cindy Derby illustrate creepy POEMS for kids! And what weirdo, philosophical, psychological poems these are too. Bramer & Derby are the wonder duo that brought us those incredible collections Climbing Shadows and Robot, Unicorn, Queen. If you remember, Shannon is a recess monitor who likes to give the kids on the playground poems. They’d give her a topic and she’d give them a poem about it. And since kids love the creepy, she has supplied! These are deliciously dark. Some make a lot more sense than others, but the ones that make the least sense really know how to make you feel deeply unnerved. Is that a good thing? You be the judge.

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This Is Not a Small Voice: Poems by Black Poets by Traci N. Todd, ill. Jade Orlando

As with any poetry collection for kids, there are a number of factors to take into account when you’re assessing how satisfactory it is. First off, is everyone inside dead? In the case of Traci N. Todd’s selections, nope. Langston Hughes certainly kicks everything off with “The Dream Keeper” but John Agard, while he may be 76 years of age now, is the second (with “Come All You Little Persons”). Now let’s look at the collection itself. Are the poems interesting? Do they have anything to say to kids today or are they mostly innocuous pablum about flowers and stars and such? Happily, there’s a real mix here. Funny poems and then a poem like “Latch Key Kid” by Derrick Barnes, which offers an uppercut to your gut. Best of all, you get poems like “Good Trouble” by Nikki Grimes, that wails on book banning as much as it deserves. The art by Jade Orlando is colorful and fun, and full credit to the designer who made the font just the right size and made sure that the pages looked just right with every turn. And me? My favorite in the book is possibly the shortest. It’s “Why Some People Be Mad at Me Sometimes” by Lucille Clifton. It’s just “they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and i keep remembering / mine.” 

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When the World is Puddle-Wonderful, poems by E.E. Cummings, ill. Blanca Gómez

Old favorites (“the goat-footed ballonMan”) and new are brought together in this lively collection of eleven E.E. Cummings poems, accompanied by lively and charming art. Boy, it’s been a day or two since we had an E.E. Cummings (his preferred capitalization of his name, apparently) children’s book out. I’ve always had a soft-spot for the man since he once lived across the street from the first library branch I ever worked at (the Jefferson Market Branch in Greenwich Village). To make this book, some editor (unnamed as far as I can tell) had the unenviable task of not simply selecting the most kid-friendly Cummings poems out there, but organizing them in such a way that they kind of tell a story of the seasons. The key to the book’s success, however, was tapping Blanca Gómez for the art (though we would also have accepted Christian Robinson’s take in a pinch). What Gómez is able to do is clarify with images some of the confusion that might surround Cummings’s words. For example, in the poem “& sun &” there is a mention of a “drea(chipmunk)ming”. And there, on the opposite page, is a sleeping chipmunk on a boulder. There are old and new favorites here. The additional cool thing about the book? The WIDE range of ages you could introduce it to. Read it aloud to younger kids. Have older kids try to parse what it’s saying (and why it’s said that way). Pretty cool.

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Where the Deer Slip Through by Katey Howes, ill. Beth Krommes

“This is the gap where the deer slip through, when the sky is still more pink than blue.” A gentle celebration of nature, a garden, and the people and animals that live alongside one another. Would that all authors had a book as good as this one published posthumously. The trick with reading any book that’s illustrated by Beth Krommes is that on some level you have to try to separate out the art from the text and then try to figure out how good the wordplay truly is. But man, oh geez, the wordplay in this book? It’s just extraordinary. It reads aloud like some kind of glorious dream. It took me a page or two to figure out how you’d verbalize the “away off into the pines” section at the end of each selection, but once you get into the groove it’s an amazingly smooth read. I guess you could put this in the Picture Book category instead, but to my mind this is pure poetry, plain and simple. It scans exquisitely. It sounds like it should be a cumulative tale, but instead it just takes the best part of those rhymes and turns them into something new and original. Granted, no one who has ever had a deer eat their garden to a nub is going to appreciate this, but that’s nature, man. 

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Wriggle and Buzz: My First Book of Bugs by Simon Mole, ill. Adam Ming

It’s big. It’s eye-catching. And it’s full of bugs.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed the intersection between poetry and science growing so vast that these days it’s almost hard to find new poetry for kids that doesn’t have some kind of scientific component. In the case of this book there’s a nice Table of Contents breaking the insects into sections like Beautiful Beasts, Working Together, and more. The backmatter is interesting too. It’s so skillfully included that you think you’re reading the front matter. I was also fond of the “How To Be a Bug-Lover” section which even has a little Citizen Scientist area to it. Pretty cute. As science-related poetry books of 2025 go, I dub this one the most successful.

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Words with Wings and Magic Things by Matthew Burgess, ill. Doug Salati

A clever, silly, smart, hilarious, touching, and ultimately magical collection of poems. Dive through the die-cut portals into all new worlds! There’s a lot to really love and admire in this Burgess/Salati collaboration. First up, we don’t see a ton of die-cuts outside of picture books and board books. Salati uses them here to a massively great effect. In fact, if I’m going to be honest about it, Salati is on fire with this book! It’s like he won that Caldecott and decided to just start swinging for the moon every chance he got. The die-cut page turns are consistently impressive, and he elevates Burgess’s already dang good poetry to another level with these incredible full-color two-page spreads. The poetry is at its best, to my mind, in the final “Whispers and Well Wishers” section, where it gets strange and sweet and introspective. Still, even the silly poems can be exceedingly clever (I’m particularly fond of the poem “Hair Care” which starts with shampoo and then discusses Shampizzy, Shampower, and Shampunk). A cut above the rest.

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That’s it for today! Be sure to stay tuned for more lists on 2025 titles. The full roster is here:

December 1 – Great Board Books

December 2 – Picture Book Readalouds

December 3 – Simple Picture Book Texts

December 4 – Transcendent Holiday Children’s Books

December 5 – Rhyming Picture Books

December 6 – Funny Picture Books

December 7 – Caldenotts

December 8 – Wordless Picture Books

December 9 – Bilingual Books for Kids

December 10 – Math Books for Kids

December 11 – Books with a Message / Social Emotional Learning

December 12 – Easy Books

December 13 – Translated Children’s Books

December 14 – Fairy Tales / Folktales / Religious Tales

December 15 – Gross Books

December 16 – Poetry Books

December 17 – Unconventional Children’s Books

December 18 – Early Chapter Books

December 19 – Comics & Graphic Novels

December 20 – Older Funny Books

December 21 – Science Fiction Books

December 22 – Fantasy Books

December 23 – Informational Fiction

December 24 – American History

December 25 – Science & Nature Books

December 26 – Unique Biographies

December 27 – Blueberry Award Contenders (Celebrating the Environment)

December 28 – Nonfiction Picture Books

December 29 – Nonfiction Books for Older Readers

December 30 – Middle Grade Novels

December 31 – Picture Books

Filed under: 31 Days 31 Lists, Best Books, Best Books of 2025