One way to understand this project, then, is a childlike, though not childish, attack on an ossified adult language with its boredom and sterility (“call it infantile vendetta [Kinder-Rache] on life’s deeply serious aim,” to quote the titular poem [44]). By following puns to their ends or dead ends, letting rhymes and rhythms take language wherever it may go, Morgenstern injects an originary vitality into linguistic structures that have forgotten those other paths they could have taken.