Your Skeleton Is Showing: Rhymes of Blunder from Six Feet Under by Kurt Cyrus (review)

The story of a lost ghostly dog provides a running thread in this collection of twenty-eight compact and amusingly ghastly poems. Our speaker, a living boy, is trying to help the ghost dog reunite with his master, so he's searching through the memorials to Wanda Gripp (a hugger who died when an anaconda hugged back), Baxter Blink (a guy who died of embarrassment after a public fart), Stubby Flub (an erring fashionista who tripped over his baggy pants), and others to find the dog's owner. The rhyming verses, which range from brief couplets to longer collections of stanzas, include Struwwelpeter-esque cautionary stories (Freddie Diggs "picked his nose and now he's dead, dead, dead"), jokey fates (Bud Pugsley, who was suffocated by his hat, was a "lowbrow"), and some imaginative weirdness (Mo Gringott was so freaked out by his skeleton that he pulled it out of himself). There's both technical solidity and conceptual appeal in the goofily morbid verse, and Scrambly's art recalls Schindler's work in Johnston's The Ghost of Nicholas Greebe (BCCB 10/96); though digital, its reliance on dark engraving-style linework with touches of pale, cool tones is appropriately funereal and old-fashioned. The absurdly horrific scenes beam with contemporary robustness, so cartoonish joy carries the day. There are great possibilities here for reading aloud and performance, as well as just supplying some satisfying Halloween material for kids looking for something more sophisticated than simply celebratory.