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Enhance your abilities, find and release your inner animal, tap into the weird and wonderful - and gain peculiar powers by the dozen...
The Poetical Institute's Peculiar Powers of Vegetables and Fruits is a collection of 50 poems... describing strange powers... and how to get them!
Enhanced Humans! Inner Animals! Otherworldly Powers! Weird & Wonderful! Supernatural Food-nomena! 21st Century Essentials!
Letterpress Project
Thanks to Terry Potter from the Letterpress Project for this wonderful review
"The whole book is an unabashed plea for the 5-a-day"
"What really sets this collection alight is the positively sumptuous illustration by JiaJia Hamner – glowing colours, full and half page that bring the poems to life. I should also make mention of the way diversity gets represented here – it’s great to see disability, for example, being incorporated here as a normal and everyday characteristic."
See PDF of the full review here
Booktrust
Thanks to Anna McKerrow of Booktrust for her review (and to Olivia Danso for her support)
"These super silly rhymes and poems are full of frivolity"
See PDF of the full review here
(also see JiaJia's website for more peeks!)
Half Your Plate
Carrot Chameleon
Mushroom Monkey
Watermelon Werewolf
Dandelion Dancer
Pumpkin Spelunking
Extracts from The Poetical Institute's Peculiar Powers of Vegetables and Fruits
Science boffins advocate
The proper way to fill a plate
Requires half be veg or fruit…
The other half – who gives a hoot?
Yes – rules and regulations say
For fruit and veg… have 5-per-day
Five-a-day or half-your-plate
And try not to regurgitate.
To camouflage
with your surrounds
Eat lots of carrots –
heaps and mounds.
In no time
you’ll be changing hue—
Vermillion,
emerald,
amethyst,
blue…
Get the chameleon’s cool mystique,
And always win
at hide-and-seek.
To grow a tail that’s prehensile*
You needn’t resort to anything vile.
Simply sup on a mushroom dish,
Of whichever type you wish...
Portobello, oyster, shiitake, or button
No matter the fungus: be a glutton!
… Just make sure it isn’t magic,
To avoid an end that’s tragic…
Mushrooms help you leap about,
Swing from rafters, hoot and shout –
Oo-oo-ah-ah, squeak and wail
While hanging by your fancy tail.
*So much more than a tail that wags,
It’s a tail that
holds and grabs!
For growing hairs upon your chest
Watermelon is the best.
(With table manners thus suppressed,
Your fretful chums may be distressed).
Rip it apart; don’t use a spoon,
Wolf it down by the light of the moon.
Conga, tap, haka, jive,
Hula, robot, waltz, glide,
Oh to have coordination!
Fancy footwork! Head rotation!
How to get the nimble charms
Of wobble-hips and jelly-arms?
Wallflower standing all forlorn,
Tango to your nearest lawn.
A humble yellow-flowered weed
Holds the gift you sorely need.
Yes! It seems incredible,
But dandelions are edible:
For epic dancing style and grace
Simply stuff them in your face.
Cha-cha-chá!
Had it with scaredy-cat, cave-fearing bumpkins?
Chill with spelunkers and dine upon pumpkins!
The best cave explorers munch pumpkin routinely
And enter each cavern serenely, quite keenly.
Pitch blackness and damp claustrophobic conditions,
Stalactites, stalagmites, sad Greek musicians,
Fluttering moths and flittering bats,
Wandering miners with lamps on their hats.
Asthmatic canaries, long vertical drops,
Tunnel collapses and hostile Cyclops.
Ghosts out of Hades in underground lairs,
Newly awakened cross grizzly bears…
All of these hurdles you can surmount
When you eat pumpkin before setting out.
When stuff gets scary, deep in the caverns,
Banish the darkness with jack-o’-lanterns!