ABOUT THIS BOOK

This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet masterwho can make a new world out of nothing.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Hamby is writer-in-residence at Florida State University. She is the author of two chapbooks and three previous poetry collections: The Alphabet of Desire; Delirium; and Babel, winner of the 2003 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including the Paris Review, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2000.

REVIEWS

“Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Swiveling, strumming, and slicing through air like an intimate Alvin Ailey ensemble, Hamby exhales a world the shape of associated conditions and intimate emotions out of her carefully chosen words. The poems are individually stunning. Collected together, they dance.”
--Barnes and Noble Review

“Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix.”
--Bomb Magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I

Ode to Anglo Saxon, Film Noir, and the Hundred Thousand Anxieties that Plague Me like Demons in a Medieval Christian Allegory

Who Do Mambo

Working at Pam-Pam’s

Ode on Laundry, Lester Young, and Your Last Letter

9 Sonnets from the Psalms

A Birdman to You, Baby

Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris

Mambo Cadillac

O’ahu Mambo

Part II - Lingo Sonnets

Aloha, Dad, Au Revoir, Goodbye

Betty Boop’s Bebop

Caliban Passes His Driving Test on the Ninth Try

Desdemona Resuscitated by Sir John Falstaff, EMT

Elizabeth Cady Stanton Writes the Dictionary

Friday Slams Crusoe

Ganymede’s Dream of Rosalind

Hope Revived: The Road to Baghdad

I Find an Entrance to Hell

Jane Austen Rewrites Hamlet with Interruptions by Russian Poets

Karen, David, and I Stop across the Street from the Pitti Palace

Lysistrata Lectures the Gods

Mr. Nollie Hinton Talks to Me while I Test-Drive His 1955 Studebaker

Nietzsche Explains the Übermensch to Lois Lane

Olive Oyl Thinks about Quantum Theory

Punk Puck or Robin Goodfellow with Fender Stratocaster

Queen Mab Blues or Quick, Run for Cover, She’s Reading Horace Again

Raskolnikov Rates the Plays

So Says Cleopatra, Reincarnated as a Hippie Chick, circa 1967

Titus Woos Titania

Ulysses Talks with Freud about the Underworld

Venus and Dogsbody, a Match Made in New Jersey

Whatever orAs You Like It, Part Two

Xerox My Heart, Three-Headed Dog

Yorick’s Soliloquy

Zeus, It’s Your Leda, Sweetie Pie

Part III

All-Night Lingo Tango

Ode on Dictionaries

Ode to Odor, Ardor, and the Queen’s Chickabobboo

Ode to Diagramming Sentences in Eighth-Grade English Class with Moonlight, Drugs, and Stars

Ode on My 45s, Insomnia, and My Poststructuralist Superego

Ode to Fear

Ode on Cake, Catcalls, Eggs with a Minor Scary Reference to the End of the World

Ode to Little Boys

Ode to White Peaches, Pennies, Planets, and Bijou, the Dog

Ode on the Letter M

Notes

Acknowledgments

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