LaRosa wrote: “Because I would not stop for Death–One day she kidnapped me–A Ferrari held the two of us. . .”
Emily Dickinson wrote: “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me– The carriage held but just ourselves. . .”

As a bow to John Keats, LaRosa titles a poem “On Last Looking into Hefner’s Playboy,” after Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

One of my favorites was inspired not only by Robert Frost but by Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” comic strip: “I have been one acquainted with the kite (rather than Frost’s “Night”). . . Kite-Eating Trees will always bite for spite!”

Another bow to Robert Frost: “Some say my itch is caused by skeeters, Some say by lice.” LaRosa’s poem has the same rhythm and number of lines as Frost’s famous “Fire and Ice” poem.

In other sections of the book, he imagines a correspondence between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, in their typical poetic voices. He writes poems finding rhymes for un-rhyming words. He invents proverbs and “converbs,”– “What’s bad for the goose is good for the sauce.” Then he invents second lines: “I wandered lonely as a cloud (Wordsworth)– Then passed my water on a crowd.” There are four-line epitaphs, supposedly written by and in the style of ten famous poets.

And throughout the book there is sometimes a political jab, such as in homage to W.C. Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”: ” so much depends– on– a golden hair– piece. . .”

I enjoyed the styles, the creative adaptations, and the poetic knowledge behind the whimsy (and occasional seriousness) in this book.