Willowbrook Whispers of Love and Abyssal Shadows is a Dark Romantasy novel that follows Mirabelle the healers journey home from the city to the countryside to visit her loving family. Her daily routine of long hard days grinding away on her patients challenging needs is interrupted when her lover's servant surprises her with a letter from her parents. Joined by her lovely shapeshifter friend Yumi they set off on what will become a transformative romance experience as they redefine the boundaries of their friendship while discovering horrific supernatural threats. Written in my own personal dungeon mastering style this darker leaning romantasy story will not leave your imaginations thirst unslaked. Also, as I discover the story by throwing circumstances at my characters and roleplaying out their reactions, I too don't yet know what will happen in the next book beyond a few key scenes. This story runs for 131,000 words and depending on your reading format will be between 475-550 pages in length, or one good afternoon on the couch.
Enter Centuria, where romance, magic, and dark evils coexist. Mirabelle Lysandra Thorne's return to Willowbrook thrusts into balance between love and adventure, surrounded by passionate presences and frightening mysteries. Unique experiences and sincere affection surround Mirabelle in Willowbrook: Whispers of Love and Abyssal Shadows, as she finds secret agendas, old rites, and forbidden information, unknowable horrors emerge. Every brush with cosmic terror tests her sanity, proving love all the more valuable in a world on the verge of lunacy. Will love pull her back from the brink? Or will madness find purpose in the darkness within?
This art-filled sourcebook about aberrations in the D&D world takes a comprehensive look at bizarre monsters and the heroes who fight them. Illustrations.
The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.
I Carry My Mother is a book-length cycle of poems that explores a daughter's journey through her mother's illness and death. From diagnosis through yahrtzeit (one-year anniversary), the narrator grapples with what it means to lose a mother. The poems, written in a variety of forms (sonnet, pantoum, villanelle, sestina, terza rima, haiku, and others) are finely crafted, completely accessible, and full of startling, poignant, and powerful imagery. These poems will resonant with all who have lost a parent, relative, spouse, friend, or anyone whom they dearly love. In a passionate book, Lesléa Newman chronicles her mother's dying and the phases of her own grieving. She fuses an unsparing realism with lyrical intensity, in honest, direct, clear language, in mostly rhymed stanzas. The pages seem to tremble with an accurate description of changing emotional states, all born of the closeness, humor, and love in the mother-daughter relationship. -Naomi Replansky, author of The Dangerous World and Collected Poems. After the introductory poem I thought 'oh dear, I'm going to cry my way through the whole thing.' And then, the exquisite first-rate poetry-using forms like triolet and rondeau-took me to a much deeper place than tears can possibly reveal. This is a very beautiful book. -Judy Grahn, author of A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet. Throughout her long career, Lesléa Newman has distinguished herself by diving deep into the essentials of life and delivering them with a light touch. The poems in her new collection, I Carry My Mother, are both light and dark. They are small rituals that draw us closer to the child within, revealing the complex love between a vivacious mother and an independent daughter. Each verse is a spiritual chant; each line is a lyric glistening with grief. -Jewelle Gomez, author ofThe Gilda Stories and Oral Tradition. Using forms inspired by poets ranging from Wallace Stevens to Dr. Seuss, from Sir Philip Sidney to Elizabeth Bishop, Lesléa Newman's heartfelt poems are a loving tribute to her mother. The poems move back and forth between precise images of her mother in life-"her tiny feet/Her toenails painted candy-apple red," -and images of her mother as she dies-"a tiny, mottled lump of clay." I Carry My Mother allows us to look into a deeply personal portrait of a mother and daughter who are so much alike that when the daughter looks into the mirror, "my mother stares back." In the dedication, Newman writes, "may her memory be a blessing." These poems evoke and preserve those memories, showing how love lives on after death. -Ellen Bass, author ofLike a Beggar and The Human Line
Poetry. Winner of the 2015 David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize. A collection that takes on the profound questions in language that catches the ear and the imagination. Arising out of wild fires and ash, birds and shadows, deaths in the family and lives in the natural world, A DIFFERENT WAKEFUL ANIMAL investigates what perishes and what might remain.
I have a dog. An inconvenient dog. When I wake up, my dog is inconvenient. When I'm getting dressed, my dog is inconvenient. And when I'm making tunnels, my dog is SUPER inconvenient. But sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be big and warm and cuddly. Sometimes, an inconvenient dog can be the most comforting friend in the whole wide world.
Dannye Powell's poems are insightful and smart, and her gift for the perfect metaphor continues to feel effortless and natural. She finds humor in some of the bumps life amply provides, so that even poems dealing with difficult moments and tough issues leave the reader feeling uplifted. -Susan Ludvigson
"My intention was to 'peek' at I Wish My Father, but I couldn't put it down, and after the last poem, I started again from page one and read to the end. This collection is so moving and plain-spoken, that the careful attention to the ingredients of sound and prosody baked into each line might go unnoticed, which is what we, as poets, hope for. I got to know the author's dad in all his humanity; he is now part of my family. A wonderful companion to I Carry My Mother; in both volumes, Newman captures the moods and personalities beautifully". -Richard Michelson, author of More Money Than God "I Wish My Father is a study of a father-daughter relationship, full of daily expressions of love, loyalty, and devotion that passes between the two. In this book-length verse sequence, a partner to Newman's previous collection I Carry My Mother, the poet bears witness to her father's life, post losing his wife/her mother, and brings forth their shared grief in finely wrought observations of domestic moments that resound with larger meaning. With Newman's trademark clarity of language and her matter-of-fact tone mixed with tenderness, these poems offer moving reflections on facing the vicissitudes of aging, loss, and mortality." -Shara McCallum, author of No Ruined Stone "This collection speaks eloquently to the dictum that if you write fully about one person, you write about all people in their humanity. Lesléa Newman deftly enumerates situations that in their beautifully observed wrinkles and folds give forth the feeling of an aged man's life and his relationship with his daughter, who, in dealing with his crotchets and quibbles, to saying nothing of pure stubbornness, is 'on the edge / of a nervous breakdown.' Droll and sad, these poems possess an abundance of insight, a precious empathy that rises out of the depths of exasperation into the bemused heights of love." -Baron Wormser, author of Unidentified Sighing Objects
