
How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide
by Pamela Miller
44 Poems ~ 78 pages
Price: $16.95
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
ISBN #: 978-1-963115-99-4
To Order:Ebay or Amazon.com
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Emily Dickinson was among America’s most unconventional poets. One of her poems is titled, “I am nobody, who are you?” Such lines stop one short, compel one to pause, scratch one’s head and ponder the meaning of things. But wait, there is another poet standing in the wings, ready to lay claim to “most unconventional poet.” Her name is Pamela Miller and How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide is Exhibit A. By the way, would Miller revise Dickinson’s famous line to read: “I am somebody, who are you?” If the title doesn't grab your attention, ask your medical professional to take your pulse.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
I’ve lost all interest in contemporary poetry except for the poems of Pamela Miller, who continues unabashedly to write beautifully, jarringly, and murderously, “like a cloud of exuberant perfume.” Her trenchant invention never fails to incite my blood and excite my brain and nerves. Time after time, poem after poem, she just kills it. Her new book How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide” has more great lines in it than any book since The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake.
–Bill Yarrow, author of Blasphemer and The Vig of Love
If you fancy poems that merely “wash life’s windshield,” Pamela Miller’s new book may perplex. But if instead you long for poetry “that makes Gaudi’s towers swoon,/ then claw the sky wide open,” then you have found your muse! 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. Miller’s poems locate and dislocate our mortality, our lust, our fears, our stale sense of reality, with a hobgoblin of new images and keen insight. Beneath their surface pleasures, these poems resonate with the poet’s generous and exuberant delight in our weird and wounded humanity. Bless her!
–Ralph Hamilton, author of Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail
I’m in love all over again with Miller’s hilarity, language, unexpected images, and harrowing encounters with deep, dark reality, its caverns and tunnels illuminated by the headlamp on her hardhat. This poet of wild and precise images takes abstractions and folds them up into jillion origami frogs to set in a circle around a shimmering pond and kiss, one by one.
–Kathleen Kirk, author of Prick of the Spindle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pamela Miller has been gleefully embroidering the fringes of Chicago’s poetry scene for more than 40 years. She is the author five other books: Fast Little Shoes (Erie Street Press), Mysterious Coleslaw (Ridgeway Press), Recipe for Disaster and Mr. Mischief (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Paris Review, Wicked Alice, 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 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, scient fiction writer Richard Chwedyk.
FROM THE BOOK:
How to Do the Greased Wombat Slide
by Pamela Miller
Ladies and gentlemen,
here’s how the dance goes:
The acrobats come in through this door.
The zealots come in through that door.
A greased wombat slides down a pole
and everybody chases after him.
Desire sweeps in through his door.
The debutantes mince in through that door.
A greased wombat slices down a pole
and their skirts burst into flames.
The meek march in through this door.
The earth rolls in through that door.
A greased wombat slides down a pole
and proclaims himself Grand Usurper.
Our best selves waltz in through this door.
Our worst selves slink in through that door.
A greased wombat slides down a pole
and the whole game’s up for grabs.
The four horsemen gallop through this door.
Armageddon thunders in through that door.
That goddamned wombat slides down the pole
and even you won’t be able to stop him.
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