How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide
Unsolicited Press
$16.95
You can purchase a copy here.
Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider
It’s rare to find a work that inspires not only how to live (and write) more courageously, but also how to write (and live) more fully. It’s just as rare to stumble across a work that provokes spontaneous laughter in addition to serious and lengthy reflection. How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide is such a work. It accomplishes all of the above, as it inspires, intrigues, and delights.
The collection is a treasure chest of how-tos and answers to questions readers likely never knew they had. The work celebrates the wisdom often revealed through unexpected wordplay and the perennial power of penned imagination. It invites readers to engage with a collection of curious topics while inspiring engagement beyond the collection’s contents. Even clip art takes on several pages of creative forms.
The work’s language, vivid imagery, and revealed imagination are simultaneously unexpected and endearing. A how-to that extends and expands far beyond any single topic of instruction, the work’s three sections, How to Dance, How to Love, and How to Endure, include lessons on living and reminders of the fragility of life.
The work plucks inspiration from the mundane.
Examples include:
I was bored with my click-clack factory job
stamping sunbursts on the heads of pins (“Ruthanne Replants Herself”)
A bird in the hand is worth a can of spray-on pants (from “Words to the Unwise “)
How to tie a tie
How to make it in America
How to get a girl to like you (from “How to Waste Time Looking Things Up on the Internet”)
In its travels through common occupations and ways to occupy time, the collection makes magic through strands of whimsy and wonderment woven out of ordinary terminology.
Consider, for example, The Spaghetti Squash Comes to Visit --
We hadn’t had time to study up on spaghetti squash behavior.
We assumed a vegetable visitor would be fairly sedimentary, but it
kept hopping around like an electric flea.
The collection is equal parts surprising and contemplative, full of plays on words that leave readers to admire the eccentricity of the pen and embrace firm reminders of mortality.
Examples include –
When I die, I’ll carve Remember Me
on a tombstone made of vanishing breath. (from Autobiography Written in Disappearing Ink”)
Don’t you trust me?
Well, it’s no use. I don’t have to make bargains with you. (from “Love Letter to My Favorite Ghost”)
My grandfather’s ghost mows the lawn in tan pants.
A corpse reads the classified ads (from “Snapshots from My Nightmares”)
As Miller plays with phrases and pairs strangers on suddenly synchronous stages, Miller not only dazzles with the unexpected, she encourages readers to reimagine. The work is as much a source of humor as it is a solid contemplation on mortality, morality, and the many ways of making meaning in a world that often defies sensemaking.
The work is also a celebration of poetry, with pieces like What Poetry Is, What I Mean When I Talk About Poetry, and How Love Poems Get Written , and a reminder that, eventually (perhaps ultimately), poetry and mortality intersect :
Once upon a time, you consumed this book;
oblivion spat it back out. When you died,
someone rummaged through your ashes
and found a piece of me, sparking like an ember (from On Learning That One of My Books Was Found Among a Dead Poet’s Possessions)
With themes that span the spectrum of life and loss, the collection conspires as it inspires, and ultimately unites. The work straddles serious topics with playful perusal. It’s as celebratory as it is cerebral. It creates and curates a carnival-like atmosphere of wordplay amidst the seriousness of thought and topic.
No matter one’s mood, the work will surely meet if not exceed expectations. Whether consumed in isolation, sequence, or a series of random formations, as a collection, the pieces provoke reflection as much as they inspire delight in the ordinary. Enjoy!
Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.