"Explores the distinctive power of poetry and love--fourth grade style"--

Discovering a book of Langston Hughes' poetry in the library helps Langston cope with the loss of his mother, relocating from Alabama to Chicago as part of the Great Migration, and being bullied.

Harry and Doug investigate when special bookmarks begin to disappear while their class is busy studying poetry and running their own post office.

Stella Endicott loves her teacher, Miss Liliana, and she is thrilled when the class is assigned to write a poem. Stella crafts a beautiful poem about Mercy Watson, the pig who lives next door -- a poem complete with a metaphor and full of curiosity and courage. But Horace Broom, Stella's irritating classmate, insists that Stella's poem is full of lies and that pigs do not live in houses. And when Stella and Horace get into a shouting match in the...

Now in middle school, Isaiah Dunn participates in a mentoring program, but he has a hunch that his mentee--a troublemaking third-grader name Kobe--has a secret and Isaiah is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Recently estranged from her best friend and weeks away from shifting from only child to big sister, seventh grader Beatrix Lee consoles herself by writing haiku in invisible ink and hiding the poems, but one day she finds a reply--is it the librarian with all the answers, the editor of the school paper who admits to admiring her poetry, an old friend feeling remorse, or the boy obsessed with visiting the local labyrinth?