"My heart may be broken, but it does work as a decent vase." Semantic Hygiene: Songs of Mirth & Menace is a multimedia project collecting the best work of New Orleans musician Ryan S. Leavitt. He writes alt-rock, emo, and folk (with an occasional dash of flamenco).

His poetic style is at once verbose, gentle, and witty; with stanzas that press up against the ineffability of the human experience or satirize cultural norms with melodic wordplay. The result is a panacea for all things trite.

Going beyond its page, Semantic Hygiene includes digital downloads to the music where the lyrics live. The author invites you to experience the words before listening to the songs-in a reversal of typical music consumption. Additionally, this collection is speckled with essays on language and lyricism, plus illustrations of the cutest otter possible (among other fancies).