Hocus-Pocus

Hocus-Pocus: A Poetic Focus on 105 Words and Phrases is Holly Snow Sillau's fifty-second book. It's a collection of original ten-line poems. Each verse contains a reduplicative word or phrase. Don't feel bad--the author didn't know what that kind of thing was either until she looked it up in the dictionary and found the concept interesting.

There are three types of reduplication--the exact kind as in beriberi, the rhyming kind as in even-Steven, and the kind known as ablaut involving a change in vowels as in ding-dong. Now that you know all about reduplication and its three varieties, you'll surely marvel at how much of our language is comprised of such words and phrases, so read, relax, and enjoy! You deserve it.