How I Went From Bad To Verse

Zack goes on a class trip, gets an insect bite, and suddenly can't speak a single word that isn't in rhyme.

The Zack Files #20.

Roses are red, Violets are blue, Zack can't stop rhyming: Now what will he do?

DescriptionI've written a book, but it's not the usual kind of "I've got this disorder, this is how I deal." My book is funny and it rhymes. I think it helps people. Those I've shared it with said it's made it easier to understand the illness without making it obvious that that's what I am doing. I rhyme a lot, make fun of psychiatry and talk about the hospital as an imperfect place that doesn't promise a cure, but does the best it can. I make fun of the food, my own doctor, and talk about friends I've made, and lost. My last poem talks about self-injury, which to some people might be disturbing, but it is a part of my illness, so I write about it.I Go from Bad to Verse is not like any other book - it makes my story approachable; in between readable verses, I explain how I came to write each poem. I think anyone can pick it up and grasp what someone with a chronic illness goes through. Just because an illness is a mental one shouldn't stop it from being understandable and have people relate to it. Donna S. Rubin About the AuthorDonna S. Rubin is 48 and lives in a suburb of New York City. She was diagnosed with bipolar-disorder approximately 12 years ago and her poetry reflects issues dealing with having a mental illness. She is a college graduate and even though she wasn't diagnosed in college, in retrospect she went through a major depression in her freshman year. Currently she is between jobs, trying to figure out what her next step is before becoming a famous author!

This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed. During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.