Best Selling Books by X. J. Kennedy

The classic anthology of poetry for children--now revised with new poems to enchant a new generation.

Built on the tradition of the bestselling textbook The Bedford Guide for College Writers, this new brief edition retains the authors’ process-oriented approach to college writing and focus on active learning. The streamlined guide introduces students to the most commonly-assigned writing strategies and situations and to the essentials of college-level research and documentation. The reader, located online, takes advantage of all the Web has to offer, giving students access not only to essays by well-known authors but to innovative, engaging multimodal texts that contribute to the guide’s emphasis on visual literacy. Hands-on "Learning by Doing" activities, available both in print and online, actively engage students in the writing process with the goal of developing skills transferable to higher-level courses and the workplace.

Poetry. At turns humorous and profound, this collection spans Kennedy''s writing career from 1955 to date. It contains 334 brief poems: lyrics and story poems, epigrams, epitaphs, haiku, poems of no special kind; on the themes of sex, the ages of man, poets, and more. A sample, "Ars Poetica," goes: "The goose that laid the golden egg Died looking up at her crotch To find out how her sphincter worked. Would you lay well? Don''t watch."

A collection of nonsense verses about Unheard-of Birds, Couldn''t-be Beasts, Magical Menaces, a Far-Out Family, and other topics.