Cat Talk by Patricia MacLachlan

MacLachlan, Patricia. Cat Talk. New York, New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2013.
ISBN: 9780060279783

"Cat Talk" is a new poetry book, published in 2013.  The book is a collection of poems about fictional cats and their personalities.  The poem is accompanied by an artist's rendering of the featured cat.  The illustrations, by Barry Moser, are beautiful watercolors.  The book has no table of contents and jumps directly into introducing the cats.  There are 13 poems in the book and 13 different cats each with their own unique personalities.  The titles of the poems are simply the cat's names or the cat's name with some additional descriptors.  The poems read from the point of view of the cat itself.  All of the poems are of various lengths and form.

Henry

She got married
In the garden
In a long white dress
With flowers in her hair.

Cats don't get married, you know.
But I watched
Hidden
Next to a wild aster.

I don't care for weddings,
But I like her.
And I love that long white dress.
I slept on it
All night long
I slept as the white silk gathered like a cloud
Around me.

I love the girl.
I love that long white dress.

If I were to introduce this book a class, I'd read the collection in it's entirety.  Then I'd ask each student to share about their pets at home.  If a student doesn't have a pet, I'd ask them to think about the pet of a family member, neighbor, or friend.  I'd ask each student to write a poem about the pet they are thinking about.  The students would need to describe a characteristic of the pet in their poem or something the pet likes to do.  I'd ask them to imagine themselves as the pet and tell us a little story with the poem.