<p>The word trickster is borrowed from my culture, which is not a single culture, but is an organic body, constantly forming and reforming, metamorphosing in the place where African slaves were sent by their white masters, not so long ago. The trickster is a name that refers to a number of different figures, but to be crude and brief, it might be a ghost or a genie, someone who goes away and comes back and plays tricks, fooling the fool and aiding the wise. To give a picture book to a trickster is therefore to imagine the ways in which a picture book can be transformed into a magic carpet; how it would lend the reader a vehicle to fly away; how it would allow the teacher to scatter her students’ imaginations with clouds and stars and rain and birds, buffeted in the trickster’s breath. This paper is an initial attempt to elucidate the importance of picture books, and of poetry, and of pausing, and of learning to breathe when you read, learning that reading is breathing, and that there is an idiom of breathing, that not everybody breathes the same way. When we introduce children to picture books from more than one culture, and we ensure we have not erased the idiomatic gestures peculiar to that book and to the culture from which it arose, we are executing a counter-clockwise curriculum that allows children to read in every direction, to go forward as well as back and to understand the historical currents flowing through each text. Storytelling is magic. Reading is metamorphosis. Each of us changes when we read, when we write, when we are able to identify our own self-image in the books we have on our shelves and in our classrooms. Change is good. Education is change.</p>