Words with Wings and Magic Things

In a new poetry collection, Matthew Burgess and Doug Salati join forces to create a whimsical and ultimately empowering reading experience for young readers. The New York Times calls Words with Wings and Magic Things (Tundra Penguin Canada 2025) “the perfect book to show kids that writing and drawing can transport them to new worlds.” Paired with illustrations by Salati, Burgess’s poems invite readers through portals to realms where the ordinary comes alive and the extraordinary surprises. What is perhaps most moving about Magic Things is that the journey always points readers back toward themselves—“the truest source within your heart where all the magic dwells.” 

Matthew Burgess is a poet, educator, and the author of many celebrated children’s books, including Fireworks, Words With Wings and Magic Things, and Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring. He edited an anthology of visual art and writing titled Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space, as well as a collection of essays titled Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry. More books are forthcoming, including Mungo on His Own (HarperCollins 2026), Serafina Makes Waves (Penguin/Dial 2026), and If the Moon (Sourcebooks 2026). Matthew became a Teachers & Writers Collaborative teaching artist in 2001, and he currently serves as a senior editor for Teachers & Writers Magazine. He is an associate professor at Brooklyn College, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

This conversation took place over email in the summer of 2025.

Joshua Garcia [JG]: I’ve read several of your children’s books, including those on artists like Keith Haring and Corita Kent, as well as topical books like Sylvester’s Letter, which explores a young boy’s grief for his grandmother. This is the first collection of poetry I’m reading of yours. Why poetry now? How did these poems first come to you?

Matthew Burgess [MB]: Words with Wings and Magic Things was just published in March, but most of the poems were written five years ago. I met my collaborator, Doug Salati, in January 2020, and the project was conceived during our very first conversation. Within a week, I started sending Doug drafts of the poems I was working on, and he’d reply with sketches in pencil, often on the printed-out pages. Then, when the Covid lockdown began in March, I went all in. It was like escaping through the wardrobe into Narnia. By the time quarantine restrictions eased in June, we had a first draft.

But there is another answer to your question that is equally true: my experience teaching poetry to kids paved the way for these poems. When I first started out as a teaching artist with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 2001, I had just finished my MFA, and at the time, I had no conscious intention of writing for children. But something shifted after spending a few years reading and writing poems with students in schools. I remember reading Shel Silverstein poems aloud and delighting in their responses—laughing, wide-eyed, totally engaged—and I thought: I want to do that. The idea of contributing to this lineage, which had opened up poetry for me when I was a kid, was the initial spark, and I wrote a few of the poems that ended up in the book as far back as 2008.   

JG: The book feels like a special object to see and hold, in large part due to the way Doug’s illustrations interact with the poems and also how cutouts tie illustrations together across pages. What was it like collaborating with an artist in this way, and how do you think incorporating visual art might shape young readers’ experience of poetry?

MB:  There are seven die-cut illustrations in the collection, one for each section or “portal.” Now that the book is moving through the world, I’ve heard young readers call them “hole pages.”

Once I discovered the formal device of the seven “portals” or sections (Welcome, Wonders, Wild, Wheee, Whoops & Whallops, Windows, Whispers & Well Wishes), I began writing two-line poems for each. For example, for the section titled “Welcome,” the couplet is: “Behind the doorway of a page, / await a dragon and a sage.” For “Wonders,” it is: “To reach the place of things unseen, / words can be your trampoline.” In response to the two-line format, Doug decided to create two full-bleed illustrations connected with a die-cut magic trick.

Picture book makers are always thinking about the “page turn,” one of the primary tools of the art form. Doug’s die-cut illustrations demonstrate the way turning the page can build suspense, spark surprises, and pull the reader into the dream world of the book. They invite us to slow down, go back, and delight in the moment. I think this may be what you’re getting at with your question: how do you think incorporating visual art might shape young readers’ experience of poetry? Poetry similarly invites us to pause, to play along, to participate in the making of meaning, and it rewards our attention with surprises and revelations we didn’t see coming.

JG: In the poem “Everything’s Alive,” you write:

There’s a secret
that most children know:
Everything’s alive—
even the snow.

Something I enjoyed as an adult reader of these poems was the way they depict the world with fresh eyes, almost seeing life as new and full of magic, the way children often do. As you were writing, did you find yourself looking at the world in a new or different way? What does writing for younger readers teach you?

MB: Poetry is a wake-up call to the strangeness and beauty and mystery of being alive. Sometimes it whispers, and sometimes it takes our face in its hands and gives us an enlivening smack. Life is full of magic, and one of the main reasons I read and write poetry is to have, as you put it, “fresh eyes.” Most young kids possess this capacity already. Their fascination with things—animals, weather, colors, shadows, space—is still so visceral and immediate. I’m reminded of the Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist when we grow up.” One of the great things about writing for children is that you have to tap into that childlike part of yourself and dwell in that space.

JG: How do you talk about poetry with children? Do you think children are able to enter poetry more easily than adults? If so, why might this be?

MB: When I read poems aloud to kids, they respond in a visible, physical way. If the words are rhythmic and dancing, they begin to move or sway in their seats. If there’s an image that is surprising, funny, or strange, they grow wide-eyed, they laugh, or they raise their hands with questions and comments. So yes, I do think kids are generally more receptive to poetry than many adults.

I also think kids are more comfortable with the “not-knowing” that poetry so often involves. This willingness to not-know and to roll along with the poem anyway is a prelude for the pleasures and surprises that arise. As we grow older, many approach art and poetry with this anxiety about getting it, or not getting it, or this fear of missing something. There are reasons for this, of course, especially if our experience of poetry in school came with a set of instructions or expectations. As in: read this mysterious artifact written in a language that isn’t quite familiar and then coherently summarize its hidden meaning. Or take this quiz, identifying literary devices and symbols. It’s not surprising that people develop an aversion to it. Much of my teaching life is about addressing these misconceptions and creating the conditions in a classroom where people can reconnect with the child-like capacity for play and wonder and delight in language.

JG: The poem “Tiger in My Belly” models breathwork for self-coping—something helpful for any reader. Other poems empower children to believe in their own power and identities (“Reign supreme / King or queen / or something / delightfully / in between”). When reading these poems with children, whether in a classroom or any other setting, how do you guide them from the poems to conversations about stress and anxiety or confidence and identity?

MB: I love having these conversations with kids. One of my favorite parts of being a teaching artist is listening to the questions and observations that emerge from a poem and allowing the students’ responses to bloom into broader and deeper conversations. Kids will voice so many ideas and insights when given the space and permission to express them.

I like the way you put it in your question—how do you guide them from poems to conversations—because I think there is a skillset here that can be practiced and cultivated. For example, it is important to remember that you don’t need to provide answers to their questions. This self-imposed pressure to offer clear-cut answers can interfere with a quality of collective wondering that can be so profound, inspiring, and fun. There is power in allowing questions to float, and when one student expresses an idea that resonates with others, you affirm it by writing it on the board, nodding your head, even allowing silence to hang in the room as others reflect.

JG: Do you think poetry is able to teach ideas to young readers in a way that is inherently different from the ways a prose storybook can engage and teach young readers? What can poetry offer that other kinds of writing can’t?

MB: I write non-fiction picture book biographies, fictional character-driven stories, and poetry. I love all these genres and of course they all blend and overlap. But I dothink there is something particular to poetry. It reminds of the Donald Hall’s idea that poetry is “human inside talking to human inside,” which I often translate to students as “insides talking to insides.” When you write a poem, you may discover things that you think, feel, or remember that you didn’t know you thought, felt, or remembered. Writing poetry illuminates our inner lives. And when we read a poem, we are stepping into the unknown, and whoosh, there we are, embodying the speaker’s voice, often across time and space and race and class, even species. Poetry really is like a portal in this way.

Also, because poetry is unburdened by plot, it can be free of the timeline and the outline. It can move more freely, and it can deal with things that are more ephemeral and fleeting. You’re allowed to “tell it slant.” Poetry is always giving permission to wonder, to wander, and to express yourself in ways that can be as idiosyncratic or as metaphorical as you wish. You don’t have tie it up with a bow. You can do your dance with the words that come up for you without having to make it cohere or come together in a rational, logical way.

JG: In your poem “The Painted Map,” the speaker describes a “secret hidden spot” they go to, with the help of a little magic, to “get away / to dream or read or draw or play.” The poem suggests this is a place we can all go to. What is your secret hidden spot these days? Where do you turn to dream and seek inspiration?

MB: I love that you zeroed in on this theme. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on childhood hiding places or “dream closets,” a phrase I lifted from the British writer and artist, Denton Welch. So I spent several years of my life thinking about the spaces children find or create—closets, forts, corners, tents—where they can imagine in peace and invent their own worlds. I also teach a class at Brooklyn College looking at these spaces in children’s literature. When it comes to my own poetry writing practice, I try to find my way into a relaxed, dreamlike state. I usually write first drafts by hand in unlined notebooks, and then later I move to my desk, where the more rigorous work begins. But it’s true—my Muse seems to whisper when I’m tucked away somewhere.

Artwork by Doug Salati.