Overview

A story of poop, fascinating and fun, not dirty and smelly

Poop plays a very important role in our lives. It holds a lot of nutrients and is a good fertilizer, helping plants to grow. Human poop can also tell us the health status of that person. Pffft Poop Expedition by the poet Kim Kyoung-gu, who captures subjects easy to miss in our daily lives and creates captivating stories, presents fifty-four children’s verses on the topic of poop and the bathroom.

The various shapes and uses of animal and insect dung

The wombat, a plant-eating animal that lives in Australia, releases square-shaped poop. Cow dung is used to make bricks for houses. Baby koalas that eat the excrement of their mothers, whose intestines are rich with bacteria, can easily digest toxic eucalyptus leaves. In the desert, where trees can’t grow, dry camel dung is an excellent substitute for firewood. In the cold winter, pandas roll around in horse dung, covering their body with it. That’s because there is a substance in the horse dung that helps them withstand the cold. In this world, there are as many colorful stories of poop as there are the number of diverse animals.

From bathrooms in our memories to bathrooms of the future

There is no one who never goes to the bathroom in a day. That’s how close bathrooms are to our daily lives, and they conceal many stories. In the days of pit latrines, they say people made poop cakes and prayed to the outhouse ghost not to let anyone fall into the hole. There was a time when not every house had a bathroom, so several people had to share a public toilet. How will the shape of the bathroom change in the future and what kind of bathroom do space people use? From the time children had to take a bean-sized poop in a paper envelope to undergo a stool examination, to the story of the bio bus, which uses poop as fuel in an eco-friendly age, the stories of poop and bathrooms are limitless.

In the appendix, the book introduces Korean proverbs related to poop, along with their meanings. It also presents the music of a children’s song by Rema, who composes music for poetry. When you read Pffft Poop Expedition, a collection of children’s verses telling colorful stories of poop and the bathroom, you will feel as if poop, which quietly handles important tasks by our side, is a close and interesting friend.

 About Author

Kim Kyoung-gu began his writing career after he won the Chungcheong Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 1998 with a children’s story, and after his children’s poem won in the 2009 Cyber Jungnang Spring Literary Contest. He authored Gulp! Swallowing the Wind, a collection of children’s poems; Nine-tailed Fox Club at the Afterschool School, a collection of children’s stories; Hwarok Cave and Child, a picture book for children; Thanks for Being by My Side, a poetry collection for adolescents; and A Name from the Heart, a collection of poetry. He writes radio scripts and lyrics for children’s songs and publishes his writing serially in newspapers.