Tana Hoban

Photographs and dots introduce the numbers one to one hundred.

Photographs illustrate groupings of objects in larger and smaller numbers.

Suggests activities that demonstrate the properties of light and reflection.

The geometric concepts of circles and squares are shown in photographs of wheels, signs, pots, and other familiar objects.

Full-color nature photographs are first viewed through a cut-out hole and then in their entirety.

The reader views photographs of familiar objects, first through cut-out holes, then in their entirety.

White silhouttes against a black background depict such objects as a pacifier, stroller, balloon, and chair. On board pages.

Black silhouettes against white background depict different mother animals and their young, from one sheep to five ducks. On board pages.

Introduces the concepts of spirals, curves, fanshapes, and lines through photographs of bananas, a broom, birds, and other objects and things.

Photographs present objects and scenes from different perspectives, some viewed from below and some from above.

Photographs illustrate location words such as above, between, in, under, and behind.

Photographs of familiar outdoor scenes illustrate pairs of opposites.

Photographs of toys, food, and other common objects are grouped on each page according to color.

Motherhood is bound both to life’s joy and death’s ether, which complicates a woman’s relationship to her own body's emotional and physical permeability. In Look Look Look Callista Buchen writes beautiful prose fragments about and the tendrils that bind her to motherhood and that intersection with mortality. This moving collection situates motherhood as a climate, a destination and reminds us that many of the connections bodies make are often as ephemeral as “clouds made of mouths.” —Carmen Giménez Smith Drawing from surrealism, the grotesque, and even horror, Callista Buchen’s Look Look Look explores how alien one’s own body—one’s own self—becomes through pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. In these prose poems, Buchen’s mother-speaker “build[s] and dissolve[s],” is both “double and half.” The line between self and other, the line between construction and deconstruction, and “[t]he line between making and being made” have never felt so thin, so permeable. This is a profound book of poems. —Maggie Smith In this ravishingly honest collection of prose poems, Callista Buchen look look looks at every facet of mothering, from child loss to childbirth, from loss of self and alienation from the body to a hard-won and completely unsentimental empowerment—mother as process; “mother as birthplace, where woman becomes location.” The poems are often dimly lit as a diorama or a womb. They embrace pregnancy’s darkness, the monstrous cleaving of the birthing body, the milky flood of nursing, and the complex grief of the self that is estranged in the making of another human being. The poems have the rhythm and image-centeredness of ritual; even the book’s title is a trinity, suggesting the multifocality of women’s experience and functioning as an entreaty for the reader to look, please. When the speaker comes into her authority it arrives less with triumph than with danger: “There isn’t a dam you can build that I can’t break. Charisma, chiasma, power. See what I will do.” This is a book about mothering like no book about mothering that has ever been mothered forth. —Diane Seuss A mother is full of cracks, this vessel. Everywhere tears, everywhere salt, writes Callista Buchen’s in her stunning debut collection, Look, Look, Look. In these poems, Buchen does not look away from motherhood, body, or loss—but stares directly in its eyes. These stirring poems radiate both the beauty and burn of being a mother, two selves of a woman—they meditate, Your body is not your own. Look Look Look brings us, birthed and swaddled, the poems we need in the world right now. This incredible collection is fed by an honesty and a fierceness mothers and women know deep inside them—I am so dangerous. I cannot remember the last time I finished a collection and wanted to return to the start to read it again—but this is that book. I will return to these poems for years. I cannot recommend this book enough. —Kelli Russell Agodon