Flames and Fire

© KJ Hannah Greenberg, 2020

Flames and Fire
Seashell Books, USA.
May 2021. Order here.

It’s better to attach life experiences to poems than to let them fly high and out of sight. Literature worth resources speaks to our guts. More specifically, when groupings of words, like these one hundred instances in Flames and Fire, make us feel uncomfortable, we’re on to something good. Writing’s ability to interact with our viscera can save us, or, in the least, can shepherd us toward achieving vital goals.

Whereas it’s hardly useful to lark about, perusing worlds where venomous wildebeests run amok or where two-headed hedgehogs rule, it’s equally ineffective to stay closeted while attempting to legitimize the entirety of civilization. We might not be able to be friends with everyone, but we should, in general, manifest a little understanding and a lot of tolerance. Accordingly, the questions raised by the poems in Flames and Fire are important.

More exactly, this assemblage puts forth the idea that each of us, individually, and all of us, collectively, ought, immediately, to take accountability for our culture’s choices. This book further suggests that whether we are in the social minority or in the majority, our vociferations make a difference.

On balance, neither leaders nor insurgents can synthesize communal harmony where personal or public views emphasize contrast. Sadly, our protracted hunt for incommensurabilities creates the type of strife that leads to riots, government brutality, and terrorism. We win only when we look upon each other favorably. Hence, at the same time as we follow the trajectories of our individual stations, we’re helped by concurrently looked right and left toward other folks’ situations. Forbearance is great; nonetheless, it’s smiling and acting with kindness that are phenomenal. Thus, it’s worthy to be motivated by Flames and Fire’s patterning.

Preface
Introduction: When Writing Poetry
1. Animal
1.1 Of Geckos and Songbirds
1.2 That Avian Hierarchy
1.3 A Cat Companion’s Lament
1.4 Unfettered Bird
1.5 Not a Flying Bat’s Wing
1.6 Despite the Krill in Their Freezer: Penguins in Space
1.7 Nope Ropes and Ornaments of the Worst Kind
1.8 No Quills or Calamus Whatsoever
1.9 Horse and Buggy
1.10 Gigglemugs
1.11 Fleeing Moegoes
1.12 Ratites Can’t Be Airborne and Arachnids Can’t Sing
1.13 That Daring Duo
1.14 Burnt Roast
1.15 Foodstuffs of the Heart
1.16 Sometimes, Stomach Aches
1.17 Hexes on Bedchambers
1.18 My Besties Have Warts
1.19 Least He Foment
1.20 Interpersonal Exchanges Sour
1.21 Long Ago, on a Halfway Hill
1.22 Wide Awake and Wonderful
1.23 Emerging Adults Dreaming away the Night
1.24 Odd Moments of Oppositional Bricolage
1.25 Playing Housewife
2. Vegetable
2.1 Picot
2.2 Manchinelle Tree
2.3 Enough Brittle Leaves, Fingernails on Chalkboards
2.4 Passionflower Leaves
2.5 Snuffing Out with Rhubarb
2.6 Vining
2.7 The Blessing on Limes
2.8 Tending Her Rows of Perennials
2.9 Going to Seed
2.10 Lamina
2.11 Somnolent Lounging on the Sofa
2.12 Precordial Thump
2.13 Song of a Barren Wife
2.14 Late at Night
2.15 Our Innocent Sin
2.16 Beyond Choosing
2.17 In a Silver Jar
2.18 No Matter Our Choices
2.19 Maybe, Draw a Caricature
2.20 Hey Along the Sides
2.21 A Pool of Private Students
2.22 Unblossomed Youths
2.23 Eventualities
2.24 Perturbation
3. Mineral
3.1 Simple Physics
3.2 Protecting Your Yahoo
3.3 My Etsy Site
3.4 Entrepreneurs at More than Six eBay Shops
3.5 No Atlatl’s yet been Designed
3.6 Her Epidemic of Bicycles
3.7 Illusions of Circle Bridges
3.8 Guns Prove Weakness
3.9 No Need for Chassis
3.10 Supersonic Cosmic Oboes
3.11 The Hoops of the Road
3.12 No Sailing of Balloons to Mars
3.13 The Transport of Precipitation
3.14 Apothegm
3.15 Quondam Excellence
3.16 Emptying the Audio Trash Box
3.17 Never a Wunderkind
3.18 Pointedly Upmarket Fiction
3.19 Atypical to Grant a Speculative Fiction Publisher
3.20 Finger Splints and Cotton Swabs
3.21 Security from Saved Emails and “Little Smiles”
3.22 Cardsharper
3.23 Of Kindly Men and Imagined Satanists
3.24 Extended Ideas
3.25 Dying in Pittsburgh with Air Conditioning
4. Nature to Be Determined
4.1 Purview
4.2 Oratory Redefined
4.3 Actualized Malfeasance
4.4 Clarity about Cultural Gongs-On
4.5 Right-Handed Justification
4.6 Salivating over Some Other Murders
4.7 A Rude Gesture to the Status Quo
4.8 A Beatnik Needed a Laptop to Defeat Evil
4.9 Mendacity at the Demesne
4.10 The Multihyphenate
4.11 Thralls’ Barely Compensatory Rhetoric
4.12 Social Tesserae
4.13 Speech Acts and Mental State Verbs
4.14 Vertigried Feelings
4.15 Surcease
4.16 The Socialization of Knowledge
4.17 Emotional Quandaries and Other Soft Targets
4.18 Noodles Freely
4.19 Desairologists’ Perspective
4.20 High Information Content
4.21 Persons of Importance
4.22 Living as Lovingly as Living Charif
4.23 That Klaxon Sound on Yom HaShoah
4.24 Capricious: A Partial Autobiography in Verse
Conclusion: Mommy Insights
Credits
Acknowledgements
About the Author