"Every evening, from the time she was a child, Maria Mitchell stood on her rooftop with her telescope and swept the sky. And then one night she saw something unusual--a comet no one had ever seen before! Miss Mitchell's extraordinary discovery made her famous the world over and paved the way for her to become America's first professional female astronomer."--

"The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks's original. An array of writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates, have written poems for this...