Mothershell
Mothershell

Author: Andrea Potos

Publisher: Kelsay Books

Published: 2019-04-27

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 9781949229837

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Think of a mother cupping a child's face in her hands, and you have the shell of Mothershell, Andrea Potos' tender and luminous new collection. Yes, these are poems of loss: her mother's cancer and treatments, her death and the grief that follows, but these are also poems that celebrate the chord, "the unseen thread" that binds mothers and daughters forever. Potos imagines heaven as an eternal breakfast, mother and daughter drinking our coffee/black and filled to the top. Coffee without bitterness or sweet / but somewhere in the perfection / of the middle. Here are poems that celebrate the power of presence, poems of travel: Ireland, France, Italy, ekphrastic poems that illuminate paintings. In "What the Poem Did," Potos writes It became a spine/walked me upright/ into the day, and this is what this book does, walks with each of us and sustains us in the long journey of all of our ordinary days. Barbara Crooker, author of Some Glad Morning, and others In this stunning, new collection by Andrea Potos, we find beautiful windows into the life of abiding love-each poem steeped in elegant imagery and story. A simple moment of sharing eggs over-easy with her mother, or witnessing her daughter's essence igniting in the Italian light, is all we need, to know the deep connection this poet has to others. Potos offers up these poems as prayer and healing. This collection is a love letter to memory, hope, and presence. She brings memories to life so vividly, that we, too, can hear her mother's voice through glittering veins of stone. Gentle in their touch, these beautifully sculpted poems pay tribute to the quiet strength needed for the loss you know is coming and the spaces left behind. Cristina M. R. Norcross, editor of Blue Heron Review; author of Beauty in the Broken Places, Amnesia and Awakenings, and others In Mothershell, Andrea Potos uses light and color and sound as expertly as she did in her recent chapbook, Arrows of Light. In this new collection, visual and tactile arts expand metaphors even further, weaving rich phrases such as all of them spun and still spinning / with filaments of unstoppable light into a glorious, whole cloth that not only honors memories but recreates tangible moments with her mother and other loved ones. Potos explores relationships in deftly conveyed, universal allegories that touch our innermost understanding. As so aptly expressed in "Writing My Mother," Potos does her writing on the top of light, her hands passing / across brightness and slanting shadows. Every bit of light and shadow in Mothershell reflects a gifted writer's heart and mind. C. Ann Kodra, author of Under an Adirondack Moon

Passing Through Humansville
Passing Through Humansville

Author: Karen Craigo

Publisher:

Published: 2018-11

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781939675781

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Passing Through Humansville offers alliance by way of a deep human lineage. These poems are filled with a wisdom that is expressly for sharing, an argument meant "to see how all things/are connected by barely a breath."

Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound
Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound

Author: Yvonne Zipter

Publisher:

Published: 2020-08-03

Total Pages: 92

ISBN-13: 9781947896291

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

If you've been combing the bookshops for a new collection of poetry that's likely to stimulate the intellect, fine-tune the senses, and simultaneously break the heart, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound is the volume you're after. Here, the gifted poet Yvonne Zipter exhibits an astonishing vocabulary, offering insights that perhaps we never realized we'd missed. One stunning example: in an elegiac poem for her beloved dog, she recalls the "sweet slenderness of that languorous / lick of calcium, like an ivory flute." Another: an ekphrastic take on discarded pencils, noting "how quick they are to deny their own musings"-a notion which suggests that virtually all writers and readers of poetry will savor this book. -Marilyn L. Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2009-2010

Escape Into the Night
Escape Into the Night

Author: Lois Walfrid Johnson

Publisher: Moody Publishers

Published: 2013-01-23

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0802486517

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One choice will change Libby’s life forever. Libby Norstad’s life has changed to anything but ordinary. In 1857, when she comes to live on the Christina, her father’s steamboat, Libby’s curiosity ensnares her in a mystery. What is the closely held secret of Caleb, the cabin boy who seems determined to make her life miserable? And how can Jordan, a fugitive slave, possibly reach safety and freedom? The night is dark. As three men race to the riverfront, bloodhounds follow their tracks. Through her journey to compassion, will Libby become a freedom seeker? From the golden age of steamboats, the rush of immigrants to new lands, and the dangers of the Underground Railroad come true-to-life stories of courage, integrity, and suspense in the Freedom Seekers series.

When the Killing's Done
When the Killing's Done

Author: T.C. Boyle

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1408821702

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The island of Anacapa, off the coast of California, is overrun with black rats which are threatening the ancient population of ground-nesting birds. Alma Boyd Takesue of the National Park Service is campaigning to exterminate them once and for all, but her systematic plan is in danger of sabotage by two notorious environmental activists, Anise Reed and Dave LaJoy. But when Alma's sights turn to the infestation of non-native pigs on the island of Santa Cruz - where Anise was brought up by her rancher mother - the stakes are raised and the debate threatens to boil over into something much more real...

Escape Artist
Escape Artist

Author: William A. Noguera

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2018-01-30

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 1609807987

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An ABA Indies Introduce Top Ten Title for Winter 2018 William A. Noguera has spent thirty-four years at the notorious San Quentin Prison, home to the nation’s largest and deadliest death row. Each day, men plot against you and your life rests on a razor’s edge. In Escape Artist, he describes his personal growth as a man and artist and shares his insights into daily life and the fight to survive in the underworld of prison culture. After being sentenced to death, he arrived at San Quentin Prison and was thrown into a rat-infested cell—it was there that he discovered the key to his escape: art. Over the next three decades, Noguera rebelled against conventional prison behavior, and instead forged the code he lives by today—accepting responsibility for his actions, and a self-imposed discipline of rehabilitation. In the process, he has explored his capacity to bring focus and clarity to his artistic vision. Escape Artist exposes the violence, politics and everyday existence within the underbelly of society that is prison life. In an unprecedented narrative, Noguera reveals the emotional and heart-wrenching loss that landed him on death row and the journey he has taken to become an award-winning artist, speaker, and author—a tale of one man’s transformation through tragedy.

Escape Into Meaning
Escape Into Meaning

Author: Evan Puschak

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-08-30

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 198216395X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Producer, editor, and writer behind the highly addictive, informative, and popular YouTube channel The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak presents an unconventional and whip-smart essay collection about topics as varied as Superman, politics, and public benches. As YouTube's The Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak plays the polymath, posing questions and providing answers across a wide range of fields--from the power of a split diopter shot in Toy Story 4 to the political dangers of schadenfreude. Now, he brings that same insatiable curiosity and striking wit to this engaging and unputdownable essay collection. Perfect for fans of Trick Mirror and the writing of John Hodgman and Chuck Klosterman, Escape into Meaning is a compendium of fascinating insights into obsession. Whether you're interested in the philosophy of Jerry Seinfeld or how Clark Kent is the real hero, there's something for everyone in this effervescent collection.

Shade of Blue Trees
Shade of Blue Trees

Author: Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Publisher: Two Sylvias Press

Published: 2021-05-25

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 9781948767149

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Poetry Book Prize.The poems of Kelly Cressio-Moeller's Shade of Blue Trees offer up an intimate surrealism, earth-born, deeply shaded, and tinted the deep blue of solitude, memory, and myth, turning "yearning's blue fire/into a dreamscape fugue." Nowhere is Cressio-Moeller's virtuosity more apparent than in the sequence of "panels." These pieces function as lyric poems, language-paintings, fairy tales, and compressed novels, somehow removed from time, with a lushness that reminds me of Flaubert-without the meanness. For instance: "A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry's/skull against the cheekbone of dusk," and "Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry-she orders/nests for her hair to keep skylarking near, wears the/clouds on her finger to be swallowed in vapor." There are poems that walk the territory of the actual, from mother-loss, which winters the tips of the speaker's hair, to embodiment: "without my cervix I am no less queen/open me, see there's nothing left to give." Indeed this collection is evidence of a queendom that has been cultivated via solitude, loss, and time. "For years," she writes, "her poemwork involved dipping arrows/into tinctures of monkshood. Beneath her shawl of/suffering, she yearned only for two gifts: to be seen, to be understood." With the unveiling of Shade of Blue Trees, those gifts have been delivered. Diane Seuss

The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu
The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu

Author: Sven Lindqvist

Publisher: Granta Books

Published: 2012-08-02

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1847085865

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'During the Tang dynasty, the Chinese artist Wu Tao-tzu was one day standing looking at a mural he had just completed. Suddenly, he clapped his hands and the temple gate opened. He went into his work and the gates closed behind him.' Thus begins Sven Lindqvist's profound meditation on art and its relationship with life, first published in 1967, and a classic in his home country - it has never been out of print. As a young man, Sven Lindqvist was fascinated by the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, and by the possibility of entering a work of art and making it a way of life. He was drawn to artists and writers who shared this vision, especially Hermann Hesse, in his novel Glass Bead Game. Partly inspired by Hesse's work, Lindqvist lived in China for two years, learning classical calligraphy from a master teacher. There he was drawn deeper into the idea of a life of artistic perfectionism and retreat from the world. But when he left China for India and then Afghanistan, and saw the grotesque effects of poverty and extreme inequality, Lindqvist suffered a crisis of confidence and started to question his ideas about complete immersion in art at the expense of a proper engagement with life. The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu takes us on a fascinating journey through a young man's moral awakening and his grappling with profound questions of aesthetics. It contains the bracing moral anger, and poetic, intensely atmospheric travel writing Lindqvist's readers have come to love.