“This, dear Miss Husband,/ is our Class Poem/ composed in your honor,” begins the penultimate poem in this intelligent, funny collection from Pulitzer-winner and renowned translator Howard (Without Saying). Presented as letters to teachers in the voices of precocious, delightfully ironic children at a liberal Cleveland private school (much like the one he attended in the 1940s), the poems chronicle ... Read morethe children’s sixth grade year as they raise questions nobody can answer. After a science-class field trip: “we long to learn/ at Park School—or elsewhere if necessary—/ how some people manage (or how they/ might manage) to/ keep from Behaving/ like animals.” One student wants to be a doctor “to see lots of/ naked people all the time.” Adorably curious yet repelled by sex ed, the children also hate Peter Pan and Our Town; they deplore bullies but also want to reform them. Propelled by layers of allusion and irony, Howard’s account of the children is a comedy with a plot. Howard gained fame for verse in the voices of literary and historical characters, often very sophisticated ones: the sixth-graders here are as much fun as any characters in any poetry this year, even as their improbably long sentences ask, seriously, “how the system we’re trying/ to live by operates.” -Publisher's Weekly Show Less