Overload

What if your kids begged to play with words and ideas — because it was so fun?

‘Tom is a magician with words, a sorcerer with challenging ideas, and an all around excellent poet.’ 

Kids and teens love ideas from left field, a play on words that makes them giggle and stretches their creative language skills.

'Skinner’s quirky sense of humor shines throughout the book and is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.’ 

Call it what you will this quick ‘n’ quirky combination of poetry, youthful humor, silly phrases, puns and sketches is designed to challenge developing brains to look at language — and life — from a whole new perspective.

‘The author’s note after each poem is unique and hilarious.’ 

Overload contains a diverse collection of playful comments and musings about Moses, poetry, wizards, feelings, cowboys and monkeys.

‘The author has kept the language very simple and used oodles of humour to generate and maintain reader interest.’

Encourage the young readers in your life to let loose with mad word associations, silly syllables and gormless giggles…in the bean bag with you, the car, or anywhere at all.

‘I absolutely loved this book. Wish I could have given it more than five stars!’

As a parent or teacher, you have probably already had some fun together with word association, punning, and experimentation via various forms of literature.

‘I recommend this to children who are new to poetry.’

Eight zappy illustrated one page stories in crisp and quirky verse for elastic fantastic readers (ages 8–15) who can handle a bit of high voltage wordplay!

‘I wasn't sure I was going to like it. In fact, I was quite sure I wasn't going to like it. But the book took me by surprise!’ 

Buy Overload to have some unexpected fun with verse today!

‘He creates poems that challenge young brains to inspect language and get a fresh vista of what words are all about.’

Note: Overload is the seventh book in the Get Your Wordsworth series which can be read in any order. Books 1–6 are available as a box set (Get Your Wordsworth, Volume 1). The other books are Einstein's Cat, Pavlov's Dog, It's Slapstick, Plain Crazy, Too Much TV and Tractor Gate.

‘Recommended series.’

What words would you, as a modern muse, use to describe this series? 

It’s very hard to describe this series until you read it because Get Your Wordsworth is (as far as I can tell) a new hybrid model of illustrated poetry-prose which combines an old art form with a few modern alchemic twists and tweaks. It is these hitherto unseen and highly unorthodox bolt-ons (newspaper style title and sub-title, an original hand-drawn high quality sketch for each story plus a personal author note) which I believe give rise to this far more accessible (though admittedly less technical) twenty first century verse.

Overall, I call these ever so artful one page hodgepodges, medleys, melanges or potpourris fast blasts!

I'm sure you will have your own version. Other fast blast type descriptors include…

casual poetry-prose

poetry-prose fusion

laugh now, think later verse

micro poetry-prose

illustrated micro fiction

poetry-prose mash-up

rap traps

one minute super shorts

playful poetry

cheeky poetry chunks

little book of laughs