Living with Limericks

n nRadio personality and author Garrison Keillor delights and astounds in this hybrid memoir/poetry collection that combines anecdotes from his childhood and his A Prairie Home Companion years with literary limericks, darkly humorous limericks, extended limericks (aka limericks with porches), and so much more. n nLimericks are the poems that can be written in the empty spaces between life, Keillor posits, and this compact book illustrates the full range of the form's utility: thank-you notes to doctors, odes to Prairie Home performers, postcard greetings from exotic places, succinct biographies of favorite writers, and scribbles in the margins of Sunday church programs. Readers who have always pined for the perfect limerick hinging on the place name Schenectady will at long last be placated. Meanwhile, longtime Keillor fans will gain insight into a whole new side of the bestselling author, whose obsession with limericks goes all the way back to when the bespectacled, lanky youth wearing hand-me-down jeans (from his sister) recited to his Anoka High School class: n nThere was a young man of Anokan nWho tried to write a great limerick.n nHe tried and he triedn nAnd some were not bad, n nBut something seemed to be missing.n