Why I Don't Write Children's Literature

Gary Soto is a poet and, in his previous writing life, author of children’s literature. Moreover, he is an essayist whose works, such as Living Up the Street, A Summer Life, and What Poets Are Like, were celebrated for their openness and vivid image-making. In this collection, the poet again offers prose that is robust, confessional, and peculiar in its observations. He addresses time. He considers aging. If each day of the week represented a decade, then Soto is now cruising late Saturday afternoon. As the clock’s gears relentlessly grind, he’s soon on Sunday—but Sunday morning! He still has time to enjoy the world about him.

Soto is a master essayist. His sharply refined sentences are worth a second read, and often a pencil in hand. Soto’s world is quirky, captured in narrative that will soften readers with laughter and empathy. Like many boomers, he laments his sense of failure. Like them, he shrugs off that failure to recast his remaining years. He befriends daffodils, praises theater and tribute bands, and snuggles up with his wife of nearly forty years. This book is short enough to read in one sitting on the couch and encourages a second reading with deeper pleasure in bed.