Ounce Dice Trice [Hardcover]

What can words be, or rather, what can’t they be? Poet Alastair Reid introduces children and adults to the wondrous waywardness of words inOunce Dice Trice, a delicious confection and a wildly unexpected exploration of sound and sense and nonsense that is like nothing else. Reid offers light words (willow, whirr, spinnaker) and heavy words (galoshes, mugwump, crumb), words on the move and odd words, words that read both ways and words that read the wrong way around (rezagrats), along with much else. Accompanied by Ben Shahn’s glorious drawings,Ounce Dice Triceis a book of endless delights, not to mention the only place where you can find the answer to the question: What is a gongoozler? Well, all I can say is quoz.

I want every children's book editor and also every primary and middle school teacher and librarian in America to read this book. It is the antidote to plotting, plot-driven, two-line synopsizable, anti-imagination books....[Ounce Dice Trice] can be read cover to cover, back to front, middle to end, upside down, any way you like.   --Daniel Pinkwater,Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, 12/12/09

“Ben Shahn’s drawings turnOunce, Dice, Trice, a word-nonsense book by Alastair Reid, into an art book.”–Los Angeles Times

“The book, with more than 100 pictures by Ben Shahn, was designed to amuse and the words belong on the borderline where ‘the poet and the child meet.’” –The New York Times

“Quite marvelous. Illustrated masterfully by artist Ben Shahn. A highly-unusual treat for ages 6 to 100.” —Orange Marmalade Books 

For decades, New Yorker writer Alastair Reid has been collecting words, weird ones. InOunce, Dice, Trice,the words play tricks on each other and on the reader. Gongoozler. Piddocks. Mumruffin. Reid twists thlc.