Jefferson is the lover every woman wants to beÑor to have. Magnetically attractive, athletic, alcoholic, Jefferson is an anchorless innocent wandering through a world of women who can resist her no more than she can resist them. Never lacking a lover, Jefferson knows little of love; brought up on the right side of the tracks, she's drawn to the wild side. Every lesbian has known JeffersonÑor is Jefferson. Not since The Well of Loneliness has there been a lesbian novel of this scope. But much has changed since thenÉ
Featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac “Ellen Bass’s new poetry collection, Like a Beggar, pulses with sex, humor and compassion.”—The New York Times “Bass tries to convey everyday wonder on contemporary experiences of sex, work, aging, and war. Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly “In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—Booklist Ellen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness. From "Another Story": After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table. Janet and I just watched a NOVA special and we're explaining to her mother the age and size of the universe— the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies. Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall. How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness. I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry, and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass. This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says, even though we gave her the Maker's Mark while we're drinking Glendronach... Ellen Bass's poetry includes Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University.
Why, asks Kelly Johnson, does Christian ethics so rarely tackle the real-life question of whether to give to beggars? Examining both classical economics and Christian stewardship ethics as reactions to medieval debates about the role of mendicants in the church and in wider society, Johnson reveals modern anxiety about dependence and humility as well as the importance of Christian attempts to rethink property relations in ways that integrate those qualities. She studies the rhetoric and thought of Christian thinkers, beggar saints, and economists from throughout history, placing greatest emphasis on the life and work of Peter Maurin, a cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement. Challenging and thought-provoking, The Fear of Beggars will move Christian economic ethics into a richer, more involved discussion.
The second novel in Paullina Simons's stunning End of Forever saga continues the heartbreaking story of Julian and Josephine, and a love that spans lifetimes. Is there a fate beyond the fates? Julian has failed Josephine once. Despite grave danger and impossible odds, he is determined to do the unimaginable and try again to save the woman he loves. What follows is a love story like no other as the doomed lovers embark on an incredible adventure across time and space. Racing through history and against the merciless clock, they face countless dangers and deadly enemies. Living amid beauty and ecstasy, bloodshed and betrayal, each time they court and cheat death brings Julian and Josephine closer to an unthinkable sacrifice and a confrontation with the harshest master of all…destiny.
For so long, Christians have looked at lust and pornography as "men's" issues. Statistics indicate that more and more women are struggling with this as well. What's it like to be a woman with this struggle in the church? How do you find freedom? How do you find healing? Can God still love you? Will He still use you? Christian writer and speaker, Jessica Harris, answers these questions by walking the reader through her own journey, from the rags of pornography to the riches of grace.
I Am the Beggar of the World presents an eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women. Because my love's American, blisters blossom on my heart. Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave. After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.
Love is not something to be obtained from the outside. Love is the music of your inner being. Nobody can give you love. Love can arise within you, but it cannot be obtained from the outside. There is no shop, market, no salesman from whom you can purchase love. Love cannot be purchased, at any price. Love is an inner flowering. It arises from some dormant energy within, yet all of us search for love on the outside. But all of us search for love in the beloved— — Osho The Inner Journey is a precise manual for tuning the instrument— body, mind, heart, hara— to an inner balance and harmony that will pave the way for the experience of meditation. Osho speaks of meditation as a music that naturally flows in a well-tuned instrument, and of love as the dance that moves to this music.
“You will marry the very next man who walks in that door.” As the only princess of a prosperous kingdom, I have wanted for nothing—and refused all suitors. What real man is worthy of my interest, when I secretly pen tales of handsome lords and beautiful brooding counts? But now my father has gathered up every eligible royal bachelor in all the realm. And it’s just as I suspected, not one to capture my fancy—especially King Brennus of the Wood Elves, who looks like a bandit and has the accent of a man born in a barn. I’d rather be on my own forever. I refuse them all. The last thing I expected was for my mild-mannered father to insist, in a fit of anger, that I marry the next man who walks in the door, even if he’s a peasant…and what do you know? “No, lass. I won’t let you starve. But you won’t exactly be free either. And just remember, any time you like, you can stop me. All you have to do is work or beg.” My new husband looks like a laborer and lives in a little cabin in the forest, but something tells me he’s not what he seems. He says he means to teach me humility in the form of honest work, making stew and scrubbing floors. But somehow or other, he knows all my secrets, all the deepest desires of my heart, and there is no one in the forest to hear me beg him for mercy...except the wolvenfolk who howl in the forest at night. They haven’t made any trouble in fifty years, but when the wolves are at the door, I don’t know if a peasant can save me… The Beggar Princess is a retelling of the Brothers Grimm's King Thrushbeard, a standalone fairy tale romance for those who like unabashedly adorable happily ever afters with a side of serious steaminess!
