Award-winning poet Pat Mora dedicates This Big Sky to her daughter, "who loves animals and deserts," and certainly, this collection of poems is rich with the lives of coyotes, snakes and lizards, of cactus and sand, and never-ending sky. But there are surprises here too, like a poem about a woman who walks through the pueblo in purple tennis shoes with an umbrella over her head, or an urban-dwelling raccoon that sneaks over brick walls and across city rooftops. There's even a poem called "Halloween" that will make reader and listener alike wonder if the howling sound they hear is from the neighbor's dog or a wild lobo prowling in the shadows. Pat Mora's poems are colorful and haunting, and the collection includes a glossary to help translate the Spanish words that sometime appear in her big poetic sky. Steve Jenkin's dramatic illustrations, made from paper cutouts, have a texture all their own and only make the poetry that much more engaging. In one verse, Mora instructs that to make a poem, one need only leap through a blue door in the sky. Leap away!
