When Jack Prelutsky was a child the word "poetry" meant to him something dull and irrelevant that teachers forced on their students. So when he decided to become a poet himself, Prelutsky resolved to engage his audience's minds with light, whimsical verses that would stimulate the imaginations of young people. "I realized that poetry was a means of communication, that it could be as exciting or as boring as that person or that experience," Prelutsky told Raymond Allen in Early Years. "Prelutsky's poetry features animals and fantastic beasts which behave in inventive ways," wrote Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Anita Trout. "He also writes of people and problems familiar to youngsters: dealing with the neighborhood bully, going to school, and being afraid of the dark. Writing in traditional poetic forms, he employs puns, alliteration, and word play in ways which have caused him to be ranked among the masters of contemporary verse for children."

Before he became a poet, Prelutsky was a budding opera singer who gave up his career when he became convinced that he could never compete with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti. He tried various odd jobs after that, including singing folk songs in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, where he met and became friends with singer Bob Dylan. This musical background is made readily apparent in his verses, which lend themselves well to being sung or read aloud; and Prelutsky has done just that, visiting schools around the country each year to entertain children with his guitar and original compositions.

In addition to Prelutsky's fascination with beasts of all kinds, real and imaginary, his verses often reveal an obsession with food and eating. When these characteristics come together in such collections as The Terrible Tiger, The Snopp on the Sidewalk and Other Poems, The Baby Uggs Are Hatching, and Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast: Dinosaur Poems, the result is a comical look at fanciful, gluttonous creatures that offers children a unique perspective on their own world. Some of Prelutsky's creations include Baby Uggs, frightful creatures that begin to eat everything—including their mothers—the moment they hatch; a duck-like beast who gobbles up a teacher; a monstrous meath who does its best to satisfy its predatory instincts, but lacks teeth; and Prelutsky's terrible tiger, who receives his due when he slurps down a tailor, scissors and all. In a New York Times Book Review article on Tyrannosaurus Was a Beast, Myra Cohn Livingston commented that Prelutsky's poems let "children know that this is a dog-eat-dog world in which adults are either ineffective or absent and encourage them to laugh, to meet such a world with hilarity and happy rhymes."

The poet has also written books that recognize a childhood delight in hearing ghost stories that make one afraid of turning the lights off at night. Prelutsky's award-winning collections Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep and The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight: More Poems to Trouble Your Sleep illustrate the author's relish for macabre tales of ghouls and vampires. However, Prelutsky's use of language mitigates the wickedness of his subject matter, just as his other creatures are made less threatening by their very ridiculousness. For example, in "The Ghoul," a poem included in Nightmares, the author writes: "Fingers, elbows, hands and knees / And arms and legs and feet—/ He eats them with delight and ease, / For every part's a treat."

With collections such as The Sheriff of Rottenshot, Ride a Purple Pelican, and Beneath a Blue Umbrella, Prelutsky mostly steers clear of monsters while maintaining his love for nonsense rhymes and surprises (one character in The Sheriff of Rottenshot literally sneezes his head off). Even when Prelutsky describes situations more familiar to his readers, he often ventures into the incredible; or, as one Kirkus Reviews critic put it, the poet often "slips into nonsense without your hardly knowing it." Rolling Harvey Down the Hill, for example, concerns five friends and the various misadventures they have. Many of their experiences could happen to almost any group of children, except for the unusual prank at the end of the book when Harvey's friends take revenge against him because he pulled down their pants.

In some cases, Prelutsky's choice of subjects has raised concern among critics like School Library Journal contributor Marjorie Lewis. Reviewing Rolling Harvey Down the Hill, Lewis felt that Prelutsky at times "treads a thin, uneasy line between funny and not-so-funny." Nevertheless, many reviewers have praised the poet's work, and he has remained popular with young audiences. Prelutsky's books consistently win awards, and Ride a Purple Pelican, as one Washington Post Book World writer noted, "achieved instant-classic status" upon publication. What makes Prelutsky's humorous nonsense poetry so valuable to children, concluded Doris Orgel in her New York Times Book Review article on The Baby Uggs Are Hatching, is that it is "a powerful antidote to the stuffy, predictable poetry that still gets force-fed to them."

The author of scores of poems and more than thirty published titles, Prelutsky keeps on delighting readers and critics. A reviewer commenting in Publishers Weekly on The Dragons Are Singing Tonight noted that Prelutsky and illustrator Peter Sis "out do themselves with this fanciful series of poems about dragons." Writing in Horn Book, Ann A. Flowers called Monday's Troll "another treat for Prelutsky fans." Noting such poem titles as "Never Poke Your Uncle with a Fork" and "I'm Ironing My Rhinoceros" in the book It's Raining Pigs and Noodles, another contributor to Publishers Weekly commented, "Prelutsky trips the light verse fantastic across territory that's familiar yet fresh." In Awful Ogre's Awful Day, Prelutsky tells the story through his main character's eyes as the Ogre goes through a typical day. "Awful Ogre proves an ideal agent for Prelutsky's oversize humor," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor, who also called the book "a divinely wretched celebration of subversity."

Prelutsky has been called the poet laureate for children as well as one of poetry's bad boys. But there is no question that he has played an important role in fostering children's poetry. In Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!, Prelutsky helps pay tribute to an old children's story master when he builds upon characters first sketched out in an unpublished manuscript by Dr. Seuss. Prelutsky proposes that parents should take a "poetry break" with their children each day, no matter how busy the family is. In an article first published in BookPage and reprinted on the Once Upon a Lap Web site, Prelutsky said, "Poems can show us the beauty of our language and how things can be expressed. That's especially important now in our age of computers, video games and quick-fix entertainment. Besides rhyming and poetry are fun!"

After more than three decades, Prelutsky shows little sign of losing his poetic license. In 2002, the collaboration of Prelutsky and Sis produced Scranimals, about young tourists visiting Scranimal Island where hybrid animals like "Spinachickens" and "Broccolions" live. Writing in Kirkus Reviews, a contributor noted, "Prolific they may be, but poet and illustrator have never done better work."

Poetry and Food