Cup of Tea

James Whitcomb Riley was the poet laureate of the American heartland. Before "chapter books" existed, he was writing the verses that families read aloud by lamplight, poems so beloved that Indiana built a children's hospital in his name. "Cup of Tea" collects his gentlest work: brief, warm poems written in Hoosier dialect, full of childhood mischief, small pleasures, and the particular sweetness of simpler times. Riley captured a Midwest that existed mostly in memory and longing, a world of barefoot summers and fireside evenings rendered in rolling, musical dialect. These are not poems for the sophisticated reader seeking irony. They are poems for reading aloud, for sharing with children, for the quiet moments when a reader wants to feel something uncomplicated and true. No one wrote sentiment better, and no one wrote it with more honesty about why sentiment matters.