This small book is a collection of poems inspired by dead words of English. There are a lot of words that people used to use that we don't use anymore. Sometimes this is because the things the words were naming no longer exist, like weird old machines, but often it's because ... just because. Because things die. Because language is an organic system that changes over time and tired old words sputter out and vibrant new ones get born. Many of these dead words were wonderful, of course—funny, pretty, perfect—and their definitions can still be found all printed up in the Oxford English Dictionary. They read like records of the words' lives; they're tiny histories like obituaries. It's awesome. So, I wrote poems about 26 obsolete words, one for each letter of the alphabet. Here are two: