Shel Silverstein is one of the things from my childhood that I’ve recently rediscovered. I can’t say I was a huge fan of his work when I was a kid, I mean I read Where The Sidewalk Ends and thoroughly enjoyed The Giving Tree but I didn’t really appreciate what he was trying to say until recently.This was largely in part to the fact that by the time he died I hadn’t yet learned to read. While I do wish I had more nostalgia for his writing, I am glad that I got to experience his work almost as if for the first time as an adult. Last week I spent one sleepless night rediscovering his poems online and was happy to find that Where The Sidewalk Ends and A Light On In The Attic were both on Spotify along with much of his music. I also found out he wrote A Boy Named Sue which is sung by Johnny Cash ( yes there is video of them singing it together, yes it is amazing) amongst other really cool shit he did before he died in 1999. I’m so grateful that I have the internet to connect me to this piece of the past. It may have been the lack of sleep but I decided I’d finally found the answer to that ice breaker question, if you could meet anyone in history who would it be?(formerly Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in case you wanted to know.) Shel Silverstein was a huge influence on a lot of our childhoods but his poems mean so much more to me as an adult. You can see his struggles in his poems and I identify with a lot of the things he has to say. Anyway these are a few of my favorites in no particular order.