Amazon.com description: Product Description: Willard Espy has been compared to Lewis Carroll for his lighthearted and fanciful treatment of words. In this latest book, Mr. Espy has created a preposterous wonderland, a garden such as never was. Besides its flowers, Espy's Garden is inhabited by creatures large and small, lovable and quarrelsome, beautiful and ugly, each incarnating some figure of speech (or trope) - that magical device that extends the range of language to infinity. Metaphor, hyperbole, alliteration, pleonasmus, litotes, tmesis - these are but a sprinkling of the unforgettable Garden folk. Espy explains more than 200 rhetorical devices, dozens of them in verses sung by the tropes themselves. Each verse is followed by a definition, a comment, and examples of the usage in history, literature, and everyday speech. Thirty of the figures come visually alive in Teresa Allen's charming and witty illustrations, and word games abound throughout the book.