Hold on to your hornswagglers---new book of nonsense commeth!

My dear, long-suffering sausages, I come to you with good tidings.  You have waited patiently since the 2007 release of The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense for the newest nonsense newt to make an appearance, and I have teased you with visions of world anthologies, anthologies for children, ant anthologies (now, with less itch!), Anthologies of a Certain Seemly Character, and anthologies of anthropological asymptomatic anthrax.  But it’s time to get serious.

Announcing, the newest kid on the block:

This Book Makes No Sense: Nonsense Poems and Worse

(edited, stuffed, and sauced by Michael Heyman (he (that is, I) of the famed Berklee College of Formica in Boston), forthcoming 2012 from Scholastic)

Brimming with illustrations by the Perfectly Pre- and Post-posterous Priya Kuriyan, this book will include nonsense by old favorites like Sukumar Ray, Rabindranath Tagore (who, despite doing pretty much everything at an astonishing level, really wanted to write nonsense as well as Sukumar Ray but admitted he couldn’t!), Mangesh Padgavkar, Sarita Padki, Edward Lear (no smarmy owls or cats though) and fresh new nonsense noodles by Anushka Ravishankar, Sampurna Chattarji, and Samit Basu (he of the superhero fame, among many other ferocious fernicious fames), JonArno Lawson (Canadian Master of Nonsaster), and even yours truly.  Plus, there will be an Appendix, in the form of an Alice in Wonderland mash-up, that will teach all the wee wonky wieners how to write nonsense.  This tuition will be at the hands of none other than a cast of the world’s most numinous nonsense notables, including Humpty Dumpty, Edward Lear himself, Graven Raven, Pumpkin-Grumpkin (both from Sukumar Ray), the Potato-Face Blind Man (from Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories), and Korf (Christian Morganstern’s nutty musical inventor).  The book is aimed at all ages… and rumor has it that I will be going back to India later this year to squawk and hawk the book to any who would be so squawked upon.  I don't know the exact release date, but it should be some time in the later half of the year.  Stay tuned!