Last Laughs: Prehistoric Epitaphs

by Jane Yolen, J. Patrick Lewis, Jeffrey Stewart Timmins (Illustrator)

Overview

Poems framed as epitaphs for extinct prehistoric animals hit the proverbial (coffin) nail on the head in this darkly humorous collection from expert poets Jane Yolen and J. Patrick Lewis.

Macabre, ironic, and witty epitaphs share how prehistoric creatures like the terror bird, the woolly mammoth, and the T-rex met their demise.  The ever-entertaining J. Patrick Lewis and the inimitable Jane Yolen offer a collection organized by era, with posthumous poems paired with short secondary text providing additional, factual information about each creature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607349211
Publisher:	Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	32
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	7 - 10 Years

About the Author

Jane Yolen is the award-winning author of more than three hundred children's books including Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs, Bad Girls (with Heidi E. Y. Stemple), Owl Moon (Penguin), and the How Do Dinosaurs . . . ? series (Scholastic). She currently lives in Western MA.

J. Patrick Lewis is the author of more than seventy books for children and served as US Children's Poet Laureate from 2011 through 2013. His books include Last Laughs: Animal Epitaphs, Take Two! (Candlewick), and Poem Mobiles: Crazy Car Poems (Schwartz & Wade Books). He currently lives in Westerville, OH.

Jeffrey Stewart Timmins is a children's book illustrator whose books include A Whole Nother Story, Another Whole Nother Story (Bloomsbury), and Play It Loud! The Rebellious History of Music (Capstone). He currently lives in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Read an Excerpt

Last Laugh Layers
Here the ancient seas are dry.
Here the gravesites all pile high.
Here Jurassic, Cenozoic;
all dead fossils, some heroic.
Some in pieces, tooth and nail,
lie buried in the local shale.
 
The dino wake starts. Goodness gracious,
time to party through Cretaceous.
Here’s a glass, so meteoric,
raised to toast the prehistoric.
Do we miss them? Now and then.
But we survivors say, “Amen.”