2022 Eric Hoffer Awards - Poetry Finalist A poetry collection pulling from the author's personal narrative to take the reader on a journey through family, mental health, grief, pop culture, body image, queer identity, love, joy, memory, myth, and magic. The collection follows a trajectory of 1) exploring identity, avoidance, escapism, and shame, then 2) facing and confronting fears, shame, grief, and self-image, and finally 3) breaking down stigma, searching for joy, finding self-acceptance, and the value of storytelling and sharing as a tool to connect, love, and choose progress.
Singer’s highly anticipated debut book collects and transforms work from his ten years as a mainstay of the NYC poetry scene. With work that ranges from the laugh out loud funny to the silence and rage of loss, Forgive Yourself These Tiny Acts of Self-Destruction is a must read. As the book unfolds Jared guides the reader through fresh takes on the discussion of body image and body positivity side by side with all too familiar discussions of mental health, anxiety and suicide. It explores the complex cloth that is American culture and New York in particular, taking extra time to examine his identity as a Jewish American and how that underpins the authors daily experience. Forgive Yourself is a modern handbook for finding yourself and your place without losing your way.
The debut poetry chapbook from Patrick Roche, Wait 30 Minutes investigates topics of love, loss, sexuality, memory, family, mental health, substance abuse, body image, and the intersections of all of those and more. This collection contains poems which have garnered Roche over 5 million views through videos of his performances, as well as new poems previously unheard or unpublished.
Poetry. Cody Walker's SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN, his first collection and a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize in 2005 and 2006, is a work of comic brilliance and devastating irony. From Abbott and Costello: The Alzheimer's Years to a series of letters to Whitman from his imagined grandson, this is a wondrous strange book that operates with the precise timing of a great joke, while bracing itself for dissolution and worse. "You'll need your wits about you when you read this astonishing book. Cody Walker keeps working surprises, setting traps, yanking rugs from underfoot--and I must say, I enjoyed myself no end. Escalation, 2007, for instance, sounds as if written by a Mother Goose high on LSD. Walker is unique, no mere trickster but a serious craftsman who blurs the line of demarcation between sober poetry and light verse. Though he sometimes writes in forms usually frivolous--limericks, double dactyls, clerihews--he can do so with dark import. An amazing series of letters from a fictitious grandson of Walt Whitman is alone worth the price of admission."--X. J. Kennedy "In this case, the voice comes from some ways off, at an unexpected angle. Cody Walker's poems are singular, and severally strong. SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than an assemblage; it's a collection with a subtending architecture, so that while one is savoring local pleasures--a brash simile, an odd and antic rhyme--one is aware of the book's shapely whole. Like Roethke, who also had a Pacific Northwest background, Walker makes adroit use of fractured nursery rhyme. Like Whitman, with whom he shares a taste for the out-flung, Walker means to be comprehensive. But SHUFFLE AND BREAKDOWN is more than a toting up of its influences. Here's a wry and rueful and utterly appealing new sensibility."--Brad Leithauser
National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Porsha O's debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands deep into the fabric of black womanhood, pulling out all of its threads. This book establishes Porsha O firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics, pulling equally from Audre Lorde and Danez Smith. This is a book of gentle breaking and inventive reconstruction. This is a book of self-care, and community-care - the pursuit of building a world that will keep you alive.
We are profoundly social creatures--more than we know. In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter. Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world--other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill. According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten. Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior. We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, new research using fMRI--including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab--shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure. Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world. We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another. And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives. This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good. These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species. Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications. Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions. But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped. The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.
Comparative Politics: Continuity and Breakdown in the Contemporary World is an exciting new core text for introduction to comparative politics courses, focusing on the dynamics of politics: modernization, revolution, coups and democratization. Unlike other texts, Comparative Politics integrates thematic and extensive country-specific material in each chapter, striking a unique balance between discussing a wide range of countries and civilizations in detail, whilst using shorter focused textboxes to clearly illustrate key thematic points. Key features and benefits include: explanations of core concepts such as state, nation, regime, legitimacy, modernization, globalization, revolution, and mass movements an introduction of key theoretical approaches such as institutionalism, structural functionalism, political culture, political economy, and game theory detailed coverage of democratization, advanced democracies, developing countries and communist and post-communist states a range of perspectives to present a nuanced view of the discipline and contemporary political developments case studies of individual countries including Germany, the United States, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Nigeria, Zaire/Congo, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, India, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, and the People’s Republic of China country-focused textboxes giving a chronology of key developments, including the United Kingdom, France, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. Extensively illustrated throughout with maps, photographs, tables and explanatory boxes, Comparative Politics is an innovative core text, and essential reading for all students of Comparative Politics.
2022 Midwest Book Awards- Debut Poetry Finalist 2022 Eric Hoffer Awards - Da Vinci Eye Finalist 2022 Eric Hoffer Awards - Grand Prize Short List 2022 Eric Hoffer Awards - Poetry Honorable Mention 2019 Button Poetry Video Contest Winner Dead Dad Jokes is an unflinching take on family, loss and trauma. There is nothing quiet about Schminkey's debut. Every page is raw, honest and unforgettable. Dead Dad Jokes brings the impact of addiction into crisp focus while also shattering our simplistic TV preconceptions about it. Ollie never lets the reader slip into the easy sadness of cliche - instead they guide us through the realities and contradictions of losing someone you love and of death - reminding us that they need not be one and the same.
