Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks

© KJ Hannah Greenberg, 2024

Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks.
Seashell Books, USA.
Nov. 29, 2024. Buy it here

Even as I become silver-haired, I remain enamored of rolling around with congregations of words. BH, I’ve long enjoyed writing.

As a toddler, allegedly, I fashioned stories for imaginary playpen friends. As a youngster, I maneuvered characters and settings as readily as I mixed acrylic hues or combined turmeric and capsaicin. As a college student, and then as a graduate student, I fashioned scholarly papers and newspaper columns. Thereafter, as a professor, I taught courses about language and people, including Semantics, Communication Ethics, Expository Writing, Interpersonal Communication, Social Values and Popular Culture, The History of Western Thought, Rhetorical Theory, and Feminist Prose.

These days, as an author, I compose nonfiction books about Israel, about parenting, and about the publishing industry. I assemble fiction collections featuring two-headed wildebeests and mischievous adolescent geniuses. I craft poetry assemblages that reach from the stars to cesspools, i.e., that portray glittery as well as fetid actualities. Across genres, I do all that I can to embrace the never-ending charm that’s concommitant to manipulating lexes.

Along the way, I‘ve had more than four dozen books published. Among these corpora is poetry. Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks gleans the best from my first sixteen books of poetry.

So, pull up a mug and adjust your pillow. Take pleasure with me in this mustering of verse. Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks will provide a window as to why it’s fun to play in verse.

Miscellaneous Parlor Tricks: An Omnibus

Preface
Introduction: When Impossible to Select among Rivers
1. Oddities and Outliers
1.1 Fun Hoover
1.2 YouTube Blues
1.3 Hand-Powered Ventilators
1.4 Rubbernecking from Bus Stops
1.5 A Skyjacker’s Discovery of a Mad Man’s Quem
1.6 Hats of Tinfoil and Cellophane
1.7 Hospitality for a Star Traveler
1.8 No Sailing of Balloons to Mars
1.9 Despite the Krill in their Freezer: Penguins in Space
1.10 The Center of the Universe
2. Parenting
2.1 The Five to Eight Parent
2.2 Grateful for Tiny Toes
2.3 The Narcissism of Small Differences
2.4 Savta’s Bijou
2.5 Reserve Duty Shalom
2.6 The Warrior’s Mother
2.7 Wild Mama
2.8 Mommy Insights
2.9 The Wife/Mom
3. Critters
3.1 Ah, the Aardvark: Classifying Chaos in an Urban Zoo
3.2 Death by Almond Butter
3.3 Pigeons in Oakland
3.4 Hedgehogs Sneaking Cheetos: A Classroom Ballad
3.5 Postmenopausal Polar Bears
3.6 All the Wisdom that is a Grey Cat’s An Early Morning Soliloquy
3.7 Delusions of a Hill Shepherd
3.8 Perhaps Whale Neurons: Life-Saving Work
3.9 “Fictional” Critters’ Mutant Eggs
4. Sundry Culinary Acts
4.1 To Eat One More Bouquet of Ethereal Flowers: Doggerel’s Flophouse
4.2 Apple
4.3 Sentiment’s Chowder
4.4 Mackerel and Chocolate Spread
4.5 Noodles Freely
4.6 Drinking Pickle Juice
4.7 About those Codfish
4.8 Fruit Loops are Never Enough
4.9 Snuffing Out with Rhubarb
4.10 Shucked Beans
4.11 Meatballs
5. Children
5.1 I’ve Stopped Believing in Comic Book Heroes
5.2 The Empyrean, Principality of Young Ages
5.3 Eat Merrily: A Little Girl’s Cacophonous Tastes
5.4 Simple Miracles
5.5 There’s a Seam
5.6 Nutritional Inconveniences
5.7 In the Room (of the Boy in Kita Bet)
5.8 Dani and His Gun
5.9 Ostranennie
6. Youthful Wooing
6.1 Somewhere in Pittsburgh, I
6.2 Song of Oenomelian: Balance Carefully
6.3 The ABCs of Emotional Suicide
6.4 Decided
6.5 Deviating under Starlight: Whispers of Divestment
6.6 Like Moving through Mercury
6.7 Ratites Can’t Be Airborne and Arachnids Can’t Sing
6.8 Telephone Whispers
6.9 Tuesday Night at the Student Union, 1979
6.10 Right Lights of a Copy Machine
6.11 Quadraphonic Sound
7. Mature Courting
7.1 Growing Like Lemongrass
7.2 Nowt of Water
7.3 Like Some Croupier
7.4 The Laughing Man’s Eyes
7.5 Your Peaked Sine Wave of Good Ideas
7.6 All the Patience of a Tomato
7.7 So, Sometimes, We Fail
7.8 Poisoning via Toothbrush after “Romancing”
7.9 Pausing from Eating Shelducks
7.10 Snerdle
8. Womanly Challenges
8.1 Covered with a Leotard
8.2 Power Suits plus Head Scarves’ PR
8.3 Droving Last Year’s Love
8.4 On Sounding Like a Bassett Hound
8.5 Trumpeters, Drummers, Dancers, plus Elephants: Princes’ Promises
8.6 Gooey with Clay, Peanut Butter, and Snot: Intergenerational Faceoff
8.7 A Pocket-Sized Pack of Tissues
8.8 Playing Housewife
8.9 That Semantic Slubberdegullion
9. Engagement and Matrimony
9.1 Greyhound Buses Race Love
9.2 Advantages that Inhere in Marriage
9.3 The Borrowed Chairs
9.4 Your Warm Stomach
9.5 Lamb Chops in Miami: A Chronology of our Shared Lives
9.6 Ard
9.7 After Twenty Years, Towels Fray
9.8 My Fifty Year-Old Husband’s Sprouting
9.9 No More Box Spring Wibbles
10. Female Strength
10.1 Tending her Rows of Perennials
10.2 Pamela’s Poem: Cabbage and Milk Thistle
10.3 Barbacoa on the BBQ
10.4 Not a Tip Shop for Your Fury
10.5 A Middle-Aged Mom’s Response to Daycare Center Shenanigans
10.6 Looking Glass: The Costs of Ransoming an Ugly Princess
10.7 For Annmarie: Loving Cysts Forever and Always
10.8 Striae
10.9 Savta’s Brassiere
10.10 Thelma’s Nursing Home
10.11 Sneering at Womanizing Linguistics
11. Worldly Denizens
11.1 Proportional Verse
11.2 Your Knees Remain Extant: Deriding an Internet Hussy
11.3 A Beatnik Had to Use a Laptop to Defeat Evil
11.4 Upo
11.5 Long after Conventioneers
11.6 Salivating away Tension
11.7 Patterns of Symbolic Interaction
11.8 The Momentum of Needles that Kill
11.9 The Amusement Park among the Steel Mills: Reminiscing over Pittsburgh
11.10 My Etsy Site
11.11 The Property of Modest Ambition
12. The Holy Land and Its People
12.1 Mrs. Moshiach
12.2 Gan Eden, Think
12.3 Airline Aliyah Achdut
12.4 Fish Heads and Flowers
12.5 The Egret Tree South of Haifa
12.6 New Camels
12.7 Unarticulated Achdut
12.8 As Long as We Can Put Nutmeg in our Coffee: An Ode to the Holy Land
12.9 What My Soul Knows I Shall Compose
Conclusion: Intergalactic Balladeer
Poetry Credits
Art Credits
Acknowledgements
About the Author
KJ Hannah Greenberg’s Other Books