A Grand Sociology Lesson

A Grand Sociology Lesson
Lit Fest Press. USA. 
September 2016. Buy it here.

Critical analyses of social strata, of public institutions, of laws, and of media, help folks get the gist of how they can create additional goodness in their lives while suffering less. Clicked up a notch, this type of qualitative assessment, when put to verse, can capture the ecstasy of cultural creation, the pain of interpersonal failure, and the disharmony of negotiated vagueness.

A Grand Sociology Lesson, a book of over ninety poems, articulates social experience. This assemblage mouths off about our shiny, waterproof practices as well as about our dull, unlaundered understandings. Accordingly, like the best of herbal bitters and like the least of conventional chemotherapy, A Grand Sociology Lesson is, in places, an uncomfortable read.

Yet, it is this book's irritating character that is its empowerment. Candy-coated troches, ornamental rhetorical doggerel, and good-tasting lessons in ethics fail to heal us of our less than desirable communal habits. Repurposing our words, though, can preserve us when we stumble with love, with loss, or with indecision. Whereas it doesn't matter how we review our experimentations with oak leaves, with dry ice, with nail liquor, or with baseball caps' orientation, it makes a great deal of difference how we prod our economic, our ethnic, and our psychological trials.

To wit, A Grand Sociology Lesson pokes without compunction. Let apologia remain the province of stout elitists, of persons whom appropriate little concern for the others' well-being. The rest of us must collectively grapple, poorly, or otherwise, with: rape, child abuse, the marginalization of elders, unemployment, debt, alcoholism, social exclusivity, housing shortages, insufficient medical care, and much more. Our discourse needs to get beyond worthless rodomontades. A Grand Sociology Lesson shows us that we ought to verbally nod at, whisper about, beep through expletives relevant to, and otherwise take possession of our commonplace affairs.

A Grand Sociology Lesson

Preface: The Study of Society's Appendages
Introduction: A Grand Sociology Lesson

1. Castes and Dynasties
1.1 All Manners of Rebellion
1.2 Thelma's Nursing Home
1.3 Mama's Mundane Witnessing
1.4 Rorschach Blot Interpreted by an Automated Man
1.5 I'm so Hungry I Could Sing about It: Empty of Love and Money
1.6 The Boondoggles of Debt: A Contemporary Lament
1.7 Unemployment's Huffs and Puffs
1.8 The Pantyhose Horrors of Summer Internships
1.9 Fame
1.10 Current Regard for the Newly Not-so-Rich
1.11 Pamela's Poem: Cabbage and Milk Thistle
1.12 Because of a Woodland View
1.13 Sticky Feasts ought not to be Second-rate
1.14 Autoethnographic Writing Down Under
1.15 The Amusement Park among the Steel Mills: Reminiscing over Pittsburgh

2. Vim
2.1 Neighborhood Nuisances through Cats' Eyes
2.2 Bent Reeds
2.3 Tuesday Night at the Student Union
2.4 Versey: The Wilds of Advertising
2.5 The Smell of Water
2.6 Telephone Love of Decades Past (A Carol)
2.7 Civilization's "Little Words"
2.8 Round, Pop, Shout
2.9 My Backyard Squirrels
2.10 He Thrives while I'm Exsanguinated
2.11 Israeli Jasmine, Manicured
2.12 Forget Elastic: A Midlife Melody
2.13 On Her Birthday, That Threshold of First Roses
2.14 Fifty is Years Old Enough
2.15 Given a Chair
2.16 The Fullness of Aging: Autumn's Showy Bounty

3. Academies
3.1 The Empyrean: Principality of Young Ages
3.2 "Retarded:" Another Spoil of Child Abuse
3.3 Piaget's Sagacity
3.4 An Adolescent's Didactic Lament: Round Pegs, Square Holes
3.5 Little Mustangs among Older Friends
3.6 Stroppy Urchins
3.7 Australian Kennels
3.8 Some Cranium Treasures Sit Derelict: Reasons to be Mindful of Children
3.9 School Norms: Innocents Enough to be Eaten Alive
3.10 Ill-Planned Legacies
3.11 Fug Music
3.12 Eat Merrily: A Little Girl's Cacophonous Tastes
3.13 Past the Halflings' Village
3.14 The Gift Shop Woman-cum-Housekeeper Mama
3.15 Anteros' Celadon Whirligig: A Lecturer's Antique Regret

4. Intermittent States
4.1 Hardly any Cosmic Answers at the Universe's Hub
4.2 If Birds were to be Believed
4.3 Regard Carefully
4.4 Term Choice
4.5 Certain Parameters
4.6 Hand-Powered Ventilators
4.7 Fire and Rain Running: Saying "No" to an Intimate's Manipulations
4.8 Organics' Revelations
4.9 Labile Lady
4.10 Mosquito Bitten
4.11 Blue
4.12 Triple River City's Cultural Editing
4.13 Spring's Pink and Golden Sunsets
4.14 Bodies Roll
4.15 Morning Song
4.16 Susurration

5. Regimes
5.1 A Glossy Coat of Guarantees
5.2 Embrocating Beams
5.3 High Floaters' Hardship
5.4 A Skyjacker's Discovery of a Mad Man's Quem
5.5 Efforts otherwise Understood
5.6 Society's Dirty Work
5.7 Death of a Young Boy from the ‘Hood: Stratified Healthcare's Disgrace in Serving the General Public
5.8 Delusions of a Hill Shepherd
5.9 Wailing Entropy
5.10 Whose Brutality
5.11 Joint Beds
5.12 Montgolfier Balloons
5.13 Privileged Fear
5.14 Another Win: Political Bedfellows
5.15 I'm so Glad We Took Over: Elitist Politics

6. Conduits
6.1 Intergalactic Balladeer
6.2 Spring
6.3 The Hard or Fibrous Center
6.4 Pit Bulls plus Pigeons
6.5 Penguins in Periwigs
6.6 Encomia
6.7 Between Tradition and Deviance on a New Jersey Highway
6.8 Moving a Divorcee and Her Kids across State Lines
6.9 Erudition
6.10 Bleak Ranger
6.11 After Centuries, the Air Still Felt of Death
6.12 Another Wave-Washed Fire-Opal in Hollywood
6.13 Abseiling from Dreams in TV Land
6.14 Except for Guests, Who Fill up Seats: Media Watch
6.15 Nibbled to Death by Ducks and Other Useless Pithy Sayings

 

Conclusion: Bucking at Social Mores
Credits
Acknowledgements
About the Author