The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr.

A comic, mock-scholarly collection framed as a discovery of an imagined successor to a famed quatrain-maker, introduced with a playful editorial voice that parodies Orientalist excavation and literary pretension. The poems mimic and lampoon the concise, aphoristic quatrain form while replacing the original’s bacchanalian motifs with tobacco, recurring kisses, and mild sensuality as emblematic pleasures. Faux-biographical anecdotes and humorous scholarship punctuate reflective meditations on appetite, mortality, and modest reform, producing a burlesque blend of philosophical musing, social satire, and self-aware literary pastiche.