More Hindquarters Humor: Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo by Ayun Halliday

If you hang around the cages at the zoo,
Watch closely! And you'll learn a thing or two.

From the feathered booty of the cockatoo.
To the hairy haunches of the caribou,

Some are smooth and some are shiny;
Some are swimming in the briny;

No one tries to hide his heinie
At the zoo.

Booties and patooties are big in publishing this spring! Hard on the hindquarters of Michael Black's recent chuckle-athon, Chicken Cheeks (reviewed here on February 10) comes Ayun Halliday's just published Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo, which also celebrates and catalogs the seemingly interminable terminology of the tushie.

There's a rear for every deer,
A caboose for every moose.
Glutes on newts and bandicoots
At the zoo.

Like Black's paean to the posterior, Halliday's text is clever and his rhymes sometimes gleefully surprising, while artist Dan Santate's illustrations are humorous but tasteful as he pictures the varieties of patooties paraded by the population at the zoo.

But Halliday reserves her final derriere description for one particular group of critters whose cans are cannily covered:

In our research, we found just one species who
Keeps its keister clothed in cotton at the zoo
(And in corduroy and polyester too).

Care to guess? It's people just like me and you....
But three cheers for all those heinies at the zoo.