A beautiful photographic board book featuring babies from all over the world and the sounds their hearts make as they beat with love. No matter what language we speak, no matter where we live in the world, our hearts beat with the same rhythm. We may hear and say the sounds differently—doki doki in Japanese, tu tump tu tump in Italian, dugeun dugeun in Korean, dhak dhak in Urdu, boum boum in French and thump thump in English—but when our hearts beat, all the sounds mean the same thing: you are alive and you are loved.
Love has been one of the most powerful and enduring themes in poetry throughout the ages. From the ancient Greeks to the present day, poets have expressed their deepest feelings and experiences in the language of love. This anthology contains a collection of love poems from different poets and scholars. Each poem speaks of the universal human experience of love and explores its many facets: from the joy of new love to the pang of heartbreak, from the tenderness of intimacy to the longing for connection. As you journey through these pages, you will encounter love in all its forms: passionate and engaging, tender and nurturing, transformative and enduring. These poems will inspire you to reflect on your experiences in love and appreciate the beauty and complexity of this very human emotion. Whether you're a lifelong lover of poetry or just want to explore this rich and timeless genre, this anthology will capture your heart and deepen your appreciation for the power of love and the beauty of language.
Sometimes, even true love isn’t enough to prevent bad choices. Meet Inaya, a good girl who made some hard choices to keep her daughter safe. Inaya’s life is a total wreck, but she is trying her best to keep her head above water for her four-year-old daughter, Kadia. When she bumps into her new neighbor, Phantom, she can’t get him off her mind or out of her heart. Phantom is tall, handsome, and a complete jerk. He thinks all women are in one category, the one marked “no good,” and he’s not afraid to express that to any woman who crosses his path. He likes Kadia because she reminds him of his little girl, but he works hard at being mean to her mother. Slowly, his heart begins to soften a little. Maybe Inaya is different from all the other women he has known. He realizes he loves her, but women from his past and present continue to threaten what Phantom and Inaya are building. One bad decision on his part threatens their relationship, and the consequences leave Kadia in danger. Meet Lox, son of a Jamaican Don, a ladies’ man who even takes these chicks to dinner and a movie sometimes. Fate brings Lox’s first love, Sahnai, back into his life. He never stopped loving her, even after she disappeared from his life for reasons unknown to him. Sahnai is accustomed to using her looks to get what she wants from men. When she sees Lox after all these years, she is happy to see the only man she has ever loved, but she’s having a hard time letting him in her life again. She knows her secrets are enough to make him hate her and take away the one thing she cherishes the most. After Lox sees that Sahnai is still a hothead who is not ready to grow up, he decides to walk away for good—until events out of his control may change his plans.
A “heroic” biography of John Cage and his “awakening through Zen Buddhism”—“a kind of love story” about a brilliant American pioneer of the creative arts who transformed himself and his culture (The New York Times) Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself—and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. “Remarkably researched, exquisitely written,” Where the Heart Beats weaves together “a great many threads of cultural history” (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Morton Feldman, and Leo Castelli were among those influenced by his ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching.’ Where the Heart Beats shows the blossoming of Zen in the very heart of American culture.
A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.
Jandy Nelson meets Friday Night Lights in this sweeping, warm, arrestingly original novel about family, poverty, and hope. Wing Jones, like everyone else in her town, has worshipped her older brother, Marcus, for as long as she can remember. Good-looking, popular, and the star of the football team, Marcus is everything his sister is not. Until the night everything changes when Marcus, drunk at the wheel after a party, kills two people and barely survives himself. With Marcus now in a coma, Wing is crushed, confused, and angry. She is tormented at school for Marcus’s mistake, haunted at home by her mother and grandmothers’ grief. In addition to all this, Wing is scared that the bank is going to repossess her home because her family can’t afford Marcus’s mounting medical bills. Every night, unable to sleep, Wing finds herself sneaking out to go to the school’s empty track. When Aaron, Marcus’s best friend, sees her running one night, he recognizes that her speed, skill, and agility could get her spot on the track team. And better still, an opportunity at a coveted sponsorship from a major athletic gear company. Wing can’t pass up the opportunity to train with her longtime crush and to help her struggling family, but can she handle being thrust out of Marcus’s shadow and into the spotlight? "The swiftly paced story will quickly sweep up readers...[a] well-crafted, inspirational debut with plenty of heart, hope, and determination." —Booklist "A story showing how hope and love can blossom in the midst of chaos." —Publishers Weekly
Part of a groundbreaking series of photobooks on LGBTQ communities around the world, a moving portrait of a group of queer East Africans who fled their home countries for the United States Same-sex relations are illegal in thirty-eight African countries, often under colonial-era laws. One of the most dangerous countries has been Uganda, which is attempting to pass an Anti-Homosexuality Bill (commonly known as the "Kill the Gays" bill) that seeks to broaden the criminalization of same-sex relations, making it punishable by life imprisonment and, in some instances, death. This Is How the Heart Beats is a portrait by acclaimed photographer Jake Naughton of a group of East Africans who have fled unimaginable abuse in their homeland for the United States. One couple, Sulait and his boyfriend, had been tortured in prison in the months after the anti-homosexuality bill had been proposed and, on their release, had made their way to Kenya, where they were attacked by a mob of machete-wielding men. It was only after years in hiding that many such refugees have been resettled in the United States. With an introduction by journalist Jacob Kushner and a foreword by Ugandan queer activist Ruth Muganzi, This Is How the Heart Beats is a record of LGBTQ forced migration unlike any other, following this community from its darkest moments to an uncertain future. At a time of great uncertainty for both LGBTQ and refugee rights, this work illuminates the stakes for those at the center of a firestorm.
The sequel to the international best-selling novel The Art of Hearing Heartbeats. Almost ten years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father’s native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads; her boyfriend has recently left her and she is, despite her wealth, unhappy with her professional life. Julia is lost and exhausted. One day, in the middle of an important business meeting, she hears a stranger’s voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation. In the following days, her crisis only deepens. Not only does the female voice refuse to disappear, but it starts to ask questions Julia has been trying to avoid. Why do you live alone? To whom do you feel close? What do you want in life? Interwoven with Julia’s story is that of a Burmese woman named Nu Nu who finds her world turned upside down when Burma goes to war and calls on her two young sons to be child soldiers. This spirited sequel, like The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, explores the most inspiring and passionate terrain: the human heart.
"Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens' poem "The Gray Room," Alec Soth's latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren't about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth's portraits and images of his subject's surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer"--The publisher.
Each person has only so many heartbeats on this earth. Behind every thought and action is a heartbeat, which is traded like currency. As top leadership, you can ensure personal and professional success by making sure your actions are worthy of investing those heartbeats. Invest Your Heartbeats Wisely offers guidelines, based on biblical principles, to help you lead in business and live as an ethical person. Etzel discusses how to effectively lead an organization, how to create a corporate culture of accountability, and the importance of mentoring, along with advice on every aspect of running a company, from getting started and hiring and motivating employees to letting go and redirecting when you are ready to exit the business. Etzel provides a guiding voice for leaders who believe their role is to lead people, not to manage them. In a genre crowded with what may seem like data-driven proscriptions for established leaders, Etzel offers a combination of business practices and life habits, using specific examples and suggesting solutions that you, as a seasoned executive, can apply to make both your company and your life more joyful, purposeful, satisfying, and profitable.
