Charles Smith, Jr., has created another dynamic collection of poems about basketball in Short Takes. Like Smith’s other books with a basketball focus, Rim Shots (1999) and Tall Tales (2000), both published by Dutton, Smith combines his motion-filled photographs with poems that jump, arc, dribble, and pound across each two-page spread. The photographs in the dazzling page design cannot be separated from the poems themselves — each piece is a blend of words and images. Smith’s wonderful note at the end of the book comments on how he created both the visual images and the written words for this volume and will be of special interest to aspiring artists and writers. (Age 10 and older)