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Product Description: A combination anthology, primer, and custom Magnetic Poetry set, this handy, spiral-bound book with a magnet-ready inside front cover is a complete portable poetry kit. Taking poetry out of the academy and into the neighborhoods, here are poems from schoolchildren and stockbrokers, grandmothers, housewives, and punk rockers. The Magnetic Poetry Book of Poetry comes with a vinyl pouch that includes more than 100 word tiles, offering many words not available in other Magnetic Poetry kits-open the front cover, and start composing. And if you get stuck, a poetry primer shows how to polish that verse. From ways to approach poetry-sound, rhythm, visual impact. To forms-haiku, lune, cinquain. To writing exercises-lists, menus, concrete poems, rhymes and alliterations, and more. Foreword by Robert Pinsky.

159,000 copies in print

Amazon.com Review: The blurb on the back cover of this collection declares that Magnetic Poetry "has inspired a new nation of poets." If it's an exaggeration, it's not much of one. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass describes the craze of refrigerator-magnet composition as a game of "one-man Scrabble and the prize is insight." A lot of the beauty in these poems comes from their very amateurishness, remembering the relationship between amateur and amor. Here's a terrific poem in that spirit, from Annamarie Zmolek, age 14: "I see a garden / its petals are tiny and red / a light rain falls / down from the sky / and cools its lovely head."