Title Details

From light-hearted and often hilarious poems about first love, relationships, and families to more serious works that deal with tough issues like death, self-harm, drug abuse, and bullying, this is an ideal collection for teenage readers. The poems run from the painful end of teenage life, with a poem like "Bruises Heal" giving voice to the pain of bullying, while there are joyful poems of friendship such as "Perfect Blend," to poems like "Recipe for Disaster" where an illicit house party while parents are away is made comical through a wildly extended cookbook metaphor. Peer pressure is a recurring theme in these poems. A poem like "Pressure" acknowledges that it is hard to resist, but the pair of poems "Slugs and Snails and Puppydog Tails" and "Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice" both show ways of resisting stereotypes.