Jane Yolen: Hi, this is Jane Yolen. I'm an author. And in this instance, I'm a coauthor with my office coauthor, my daughter, Heidi Stemple.

Heidi Stemple: Hi, that's me. I'm Heidi E.Y. Stemple, and I am also the coauthor of the book we're going to read to you a bit from. It's called "Eek, You Reek! Poems About Stinky Animals".

Jane Yolen: And if you have never thought about any stinking animal other than the skunk? Boy, would you be surprised. While the idea of stinky animals was mine, I didn't want to do it by myself. I thought it was the perfect book to do with Heidi because she, like me, is a poet, a rhyming poet, and a non-rhyming poet.

So I asked her, and she said, "Boy, is that a stupid idea." I laughed. I said, "Everyone's going to love this book." I gave her five or six of the poems, and I said, "Tag, you're it." And she said...

Heidi Stemple: "I don't want to do this. It's too silly. Nobody will ever buy this book. But if we sell it, I will write my poems." And guess what? We sold it.

So after the book sold, what I realized was, it wasn't a silly idea. In fact, there are so many cool stinky animals out there that I went about researching, and found even more animals. And we made it into a book that has not only stinkbugs and skunks, but tons of other really cool animals.

So when we said about researching for stinky animals, we, first of all, did what a lot of people do is, we brainstormed. We just came up with as many stinky animals as we could think of.

But then, because we didn't have that many, we went to the computer, and we Googled, "What animals stink?" And we came up with so many great examples, like, did you know that there's a stink bird? Well, I totally didn't know, but I did the research on that, and wrote that poem.

And there's a whole bunch of others. There are bugs, birds. There's a turtle, there's an oxen, because we wanted to make sure that we had mammals and reptiles, as well as small things and big things. So we made sure that the book was really rounded in that way. And the research mostly came from the Internet, and from books that we had in this house.

Jane Yolen: I'm going to read you the first poem in the book. It sort of sums up the whole book, and it's called Eek, You Reek.

Eek, you reek. You make a funk with, you have been things, stinks, stink, stunk. You've left a path, a swath of smell, and a yuck. You did it very well, but do not wail for what you've done, for you're not the only one. The awful stench you've left behind is shared by others of your kind. Eek, you reek. Your anger's spent, no longer worth another scent.

Heidi Stemple: I'm going to read you another poem from Eek, You Reek. This one is called Stink Bird.

Now what I find interesting about these animals is that they all stink for different reasons. And the stink bird, which is called a Hoatzin, stinks because it digests a lot like a cow. It eats so many leaves, that that fermentation in its stomach when it's digesting, is what makes it stink. And fun, in the back of this book, you can learn all those extra facts. So here's the poem, Stink Bird.

In flies the hoatzin for a crash landing. Not at all graceful flying or standing. Blue face and wing claws, Mohawk-like crest. But what makes them odd is how they digest. More bovine than bird, eating leaves by the ton. They chew on their cud while they laze in the sun. Well, supper for men, a stench fills the air. Only the stink birds don't seem to care.