Apologies: This Is Just to Say -- Lucky Nose -- I Got Carried Away -- Dodge Ball Crazy -- Fashion Sense -- Brownies--oops! -- Black Spot -- Balance -- Sparkling Deer -- Not Really -- To Manga, My Hamster -- It Was Quiet -- Secret Message -- Spelling Bomb -- A Waste of Heart -- What Was I Thinking? -- Next Time -- How Slow-Hand Lizard Died -- Responses: Dear Thomas -- To the Girl Who Rubs My Nose -- Dodge Ball Kings -- Haiku for Carmen -- Desk Mess--oops! -- Roses are Red -- I'm Telling You Now -- For Little Ruth -- What Girls Want -- Sorry Back, from the Hamster -- Losing Einstein -- Little Brother -- Some Reasons Why -- Dark-Haired Girl -- River of Forgiveness -- My Poem -- Ode to Slow-Hand.

When Mrs. Merz asks her sixth grade class to write poems of apology, they end up liking their poems so much that they decide to put them together into a book. Not only that, but they get the people to whom they apologized to write poems back. In haiku, pantoums, two-part poems, snippets, and rhymes, Mrs. Merz"s class writes of crushes, overbearing parents, loving and losing pets, and more. Some poets are deeply sorry; some not at all. Some are forgiven; some are not. In each pair of poems a relationship, a connection, is revealed.