In their staff development work with teachers, Nick Flynn and Shirley McPhillips have often encountered these and similar questions. This book invites preservice and inservice teachers, staff developers - anyone who wants to make a lasting place for poetry in their own and their students' lives - into many of these same primary through middle school classrooms for an up-close look at several thoughtful, rigorous, poetry inquiries.

Each chapter begins with a mentor poem as the centerpiece for discussion, followed by a short narrative of ways the authors view their world through that chapter's particular poetic "lens." The authors then walk the reader into a classroom writer's workshop where, through vignettes, conversations, and carefully designed mini-lessons, that chapter's key element of poetic practice is being studied over time.

Other aspects that will help teachers in designing and conducting inquiry around mentor poems include:

• mini-lessons that take students through an inquiry from launch to in-depth extensions;
• illustrations of student writing samples in the "try it" stages, successive drafts, and crafted poems;
• words, stories, and examples of best-loved poets that inspire and instruct us in our own thinking and teaching;
• appendixes that include various types of book lists, charts, conference transcripts, and additional poems.