Teasing Tongue-Twisters

Selected by poet and teacher John Foster, this children’s poetry collection gathers new and previously published nonsense poems with a deliberately morbidly comic edge. The selection includes work by Roger McGough, Dick King-Smith, Michael Rosen, Paul Cookson, and Foster himself. Tongue-twisters are central to the book’s appeal: the supplied example builds its humor through repeated sounds and tightly tangled phrasing, inviting poems to be spoken aloud as well as read. Across its 94 pages, the anthology offers a varied introduction to playful wordwork and comic poetry from several established children’s writers.