cover image Lullaby and Kisses Sweet: Poems to Love with Your Baby

Lullaby and Kisses Sweet: Poems to Love with Your Baby

Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins, illus. by Alyssa Nassner. Abrams Appleseed, $15.95 (44p) ISBN 978-1-4197-1037-7

Divided into sections that include “Food,” “Family,” and “Play,” this tender, keepsake-worthy collection includes 30 poems about subjects near and dear to the lives of youngest children. Contributors include Rebecca Kai Dotlich, J. Patrick Lewis, Alice Schertle, and Jane Yolen, whose works are complemented by Nassner’s warm digital illustrations of anthropomorphic animal families. An especially nice section covers various “Firsts” (“Mom! Dad! Come see what’s new!/ It’s hard, white, and shiny, too,” opens Matt Forrest Esenwine’s “First Tooth”), while the “Bedtime” section may have children taking a cue from Hopkins’s “Read to Me”: “Read to me—then—/ read to me/ read to me/ again and again.” Up to age 3. (Mar.)