Dave Bonta's "Book Arts" starts from a playful idea: a book doesn't have to be a stack of printed pages. It can be anything that folds, so it can be a tower, an ocean, a wallet, or a room. The speaker walks into a giant book where the pages build themselves into birds, leaves and staircases, and even the seasons behave like dancers in neat rows.
The tone is whimsical, but it carries a thread of melancholy. Money is a book everyone handles and no one reads, and the speaker's joke that it "smells of sadness" lands with a small sting. The poem then moves toward dreams, which change as we tell them, just as some books change when opened. The ending is quiet and mysterious. Night turns the words black, and only a red moon, like a monocle, lets us glimpse the stitching. The mood is dreamy, inventive and a little wistful, as if reading and dreaming were the same slippery act.