Rootabaga pigeons

Carl Sandburg built a country out of Midwestern corn and Midwestrn moonlight, and called it Rootabaga. Here, in this imaginary pocket of America between the familiar and the impossible, pigeons wear vests and deliver mail, horses wear hats and philosophize, and a blind man with a potato for a face dispenses wisdom to anyone wise enough to ask. The six pigeons of the title carry letters between the world we know and the world Sandburg dreamed up: a place where coal miners sing to their tools, where trains run on rails made of starlight, where nothing is quite absurd enough to be impossible. First published in 1923, these stories strut and gambol with the wild confidence of a poet who understood that children deserve language that challenges and delights, not condescension. Sandburg wrote Rootabaga Pigeons to capture 'the deep down funny and underneath funny' of American life, filtering Midwest prairie life through a lens of gentle surrealism. It is a book for readers who believe that wonder should never come with training wheels.