About this book

Convention calls stories like these “urban legends.” What they typically are, however, is neither urban nor suburban, but folklore, grass-roots tales (mostly fictional), that is, viral myths. Stories like these attest to the creativity of human beings. We should be entertained and not deceived.

This book, however, does not purport to relate other people’s tales, but my own. None of these are true. If there’s any verisimilitude here, it’s a reflection of how strange our world is.

My cover illustration is based on an aerial photograph of a suburb in Maryland.

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

• Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
• The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
• Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

The author

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).