Suggestion Box: Fifty Poems

By Nolan Whyte

This is a collection of fifty poems, each based on a single word. The words were suggested by the author's online community, and the results are at turns inappropriate, heart-breaking, and hilarious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nolan Whyte
• Release date: Jun 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310665844

Nolan Whyte

Nolan Whyte is a fiction writer. He scatters words all over the place, writing for a variety of websites, ghostwriting too much, and sometimes releasing serious fiction here and there. The best place to keep track of him is his twitter feed, although that seems to be about hockey way too much of the time.

Book preview

I hate being between projects. Not having a specific writing or art project to work on brings forth feelings of anxiety and depression in me, and makes me worry that maybe this is it, I’ll never have another idea again, and I’m dead as a creative person.

In early 2016 I was coming off of two major projects. The first was a novel, 2014’s Among the Humans, which was a several-years-long undertaking and an artistic high point. The second was a venture into the field ghostwriting, where I spent a few years on work-for-hire projects that paid in quick cash but did nothing for my career, self-esteem, or artistic development. But when I decided I was ready to start something new, I found that I’d completely depleted my creative resources. Anxiety began to creep in. My ever-present depression began to clear its throat loudly.

In an effort to force myself to do some kind of work while I figured out my next project, I began writing poems on my twitter account (@nolanwhyte). I started with a few haikus, and then began soliciting prompt words from the twitter community to inspire longer poems. The community responded in the tongue-in-cheek manner that you might expect, giving me words that they hoped would either stump me or result in works of total absurdity. Fittingly, a poem titled Absurdity opens this collection.

The poems here are arranged in alphabetical order of the suggested words, and I’d like to thank everyone that participated, whether or not your suggestion was used (almost all of them were) and whether or not the resulting poem appears