Speed, grit, empathy. Vampiric powers. Chameleon cool... and so much more!

About the book     Cover reveal     Reviews     Sneak peek inside     Back cover revealed     DISCLAIMER

About the book

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!

Chapters include...

Enhanced Humans! Inner Animals! Otherworldly Powers! Weird & Wonderful! Supernatural Food-nomena! 21st Century Essentials!

Front cover revealed!

Reviews

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

Sneak peek inside...

(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

 

Half Your Plate

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.

 

Carrot Chameleon

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.

 

 

Mushroom Monkey

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!

 

Watermelon Werewolf

For growing hairs upon your chest
Watermelon is the best.

Slaver and crunch, chew and swallow
Till the rind is fully hollow.

Crunch the pips, or spit them out,
Howl and howl and lope about

(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.

 

Dandelion Dancer

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!

 

 

Pumpkin Spelunking

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!

 

Back cover revealed!

DISCLAIMER

 

 

More coming from The Poetical Institute's Library soon...