About How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide
“I want to write poems that make mountains mambo, / that make synapses shimmer / like orchids grown in gold dust,” proclaims Pamela Miller in her exuberant, endlessly unpredictable fifth collection, How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide.
In the quirky world of these poems, nothing is quite the way you’d expect it to be. A woman pours moonlight into her waffle iron. Ghosts mow the lawn in tan pants. Makeover maven Fatima dispenses oddball fashion advice (“I guarantee a chance to strut your stuff / in lingerie made of honey, / in a strapless ensemble of enigmatic microbes”). Hundreds of frogs and “a triceratops of bliss” gallop in to assist the poet as she tries to write an acrostic. And when that greased wombat slides into the ballroom, “the whole game’s up for grabs.”
But there’s more going on in these poems than just surrealistic scenarios and wildly inventive wordplay. Miller digs deeper, leveraging her wit, imagination, and compassion to explore love, regret, joy, aging, family, death, and the nature of poetry itself (“It isn’t what you think it is / It’s in spite of everything”). You’ll learn how to dance with the dead and how to endure; how to sing love songs and “break evil’s knees”; and what to do if you get to Heaven but they won’t let you in (“I’ll just drift through eternity’s back alleys / like a cloud of exuberant perfume”). As poet Ralph Hamilton (Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail) says, “By turns playful and eviscerating, hilarious and discomfiting, deeply perceptive and wryly discombobulating, How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide is the perfect book for our strange and trying times.”
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Author Bio:
Pamela Miller has been gleefully embroidering the fringes of Chicago’s poetry scene for more than 40 years. She is the author of five other books: Fast Little Shoes (Erie Street Press), Mysterious Coleslaw (Ridgeway Press), Recipe for Disaster and Miss Unthinkable (both from Mayapple Press), and Mr. Mischief (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals, including The Paris Review, RHINO, BlazeVOX, Otoliths, Nixes Mate Review, Wicked Alice, The MacGuffin, and the late, great Free Lunch, and in the anthologies New Poetry From the Midwest, How to Read a Poem, The Great American Poetry Show 2, and Circe’s Lament: Anthology of Wild Women Poetry. She has performed her work at readings in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Detroit, and elsewhere. Ms. Miller has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize either five or six times (she’s lost count). After a frenetic 36-year career slinging content for various public relations, marketing communications, editing, publishing, and freelance writing jobs, she now lives in blissful retirement with her husband, science fiction writer Richard Chwedyk.