A Constellation of Half-Lives is a collection of poems that attempt to reconcile the crisis of living on a collapsing planet with the unreasonable joy of loving and the pleasure of being alive. With careful precision and an exquisite eye for detail, poet Seema Reza examines what it means to be a mother, a daughter, and an American in a time of war. Through second-person poems she questions whether the beauty of this world outweighs its fragility and risk.
A poet’s story of healing herself, working with wounded veterans, and learning that silence does not equal strength, written “with self-lacerating honesty” (Kirkus Reviews). In this poignant and unabashed self-examination, Seema Reza uncovers the lessons she learned through motherhood and a dysfunctional and abusive marriage, and how she used her discoveries to make a meaningful difference in the world. This lyrical, non-linear narrative memoir traces Reza’s journey from repressed suburban housewife to coordinator of a unique creative-expression military hospital program. Through observing her own experiences from the darkest moments of her life and investigating societal attitudes towards loss, love, motherhood, and community, Reza exposes her triumphs, weaknesses, fears, and regrets, and undermines the idea that strength requires silence. “Lyrical . . . powerful . . . It is her self-reflection which empowers this memoir; her responsibility to take action for herself and not to languish as she was.” —Entropy Literature Review
*** Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 *** In a snow-covered village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as her father is abducted in the middle of the night by Russian soldiers. Their life-long friend and neighbour, Akhmed, has also been watching, and when he finds Havaa he knows of only one person who might be able to help. For tough-minded doctor Sonja Rabina, it’s just another day of trying to keep her bombed-out, abandoned hospital going. When Akhmed arrives with Havaa, asking Sonja for shelter, she has no idea who the pair are. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis, revealing the intricate pattern of connections that binds these three unlikely companions together and unexpectedly decides their fate. 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular' Ann Patchett
Constellation Route uses the form of the letter to explore issues related to contemporary American society: the environment, race, love, grief, friendship, violence, and spirituality. The book is largely a metaphysical tribute to both the Post Office and the act of letter writing as a way to understand and create meaningful connections with the world at large.
A richly detailed, in-depth look at fixed stars and their role in affecting astrological predictions. Since prehistory, humanity has been held in thrall by the night sky, captivated by the mystery of the stars. Seeking to make sense of such a magical overhead landscape, people used the stars to relate beliefs, creation stories, and mythologies. And just as the fixed stars have ancient origins in human life, their astrological interpretations get right to the heart of our lives. Celebrated astrologer Bernadette Brady melds modern astrological techniques with Egyptian and early Greek mythology to bring astrologers to a deeper understanding of the horoscope and provides delineations for using fixed stars in chart interpretation. Her methods open a window on the fixed stars, revealing how a major star in a person’s chart indicates the stage of life in which it is active and how it affirms the person’s life journey through the mythology that the star represents. Though the fixed stars have been watched and studied for all of human history, Brady’s Book of Fixed Stars continues to be the astrological bible for how to use them in practice. This is an essential resource that should be on every astrologer’s bookshelf. The book includes Paran maps, star maps, star phases, and mythologies for over sixty stars, New insights into the natal use of fixed stars, as well as their use in mundane astrology, Extensive appendices of graphs and tables to help astrologers find rising or setting dates for any given location, And a listing of 176 stars with their 21st-century positions. Originally published by Weiser Books in 1999, this Weiser Classics edition includes a new foreword by Chloe Margherita.
Fuller's Half-Life spans the many years it takes to come to terms with the suicide of a husband and its traumatic effect on the children: drug abuse, rape, unflinching self-analysis, survivor's guilt; the loss here is hardly manageable. The poems look to the self but also outward, to the bird feeder and garden, to the paintings of the masters, to Greek mythology, to the music of a fiddle teacher, to the dangerous beauty of southeastern Ohio's sandstone cliffs. In the face of death, the poems ask, What do the living know? They know immense grief; how brutal and dark our human natures can be; that healing requires engagement with the physical world.
An ethereal new collection that is “visceral with intellection” (David Lau) Winner of the Bollingen Prize Finalist for the National Book Award Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Prize A Treatise on Stars extends Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s intensely phenomenological poetics to the fiery bodies in a “field of heaven…outside spacetime.” Long, lyrical lines map a geography of interconnected, interdimensional intelligence that exists in all places and sentient beings. These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the cosmic loom, the channeling of daily experience and conversation, gestalt and angels, dolphins and a star-visitor beneath a tree. Family, too, becomes a type of constellation, a thought “a form of organized light.” All of our sense are activated by Berssenbrugge’s radiant lines, giving us a poetry of keen perception grounded in the physical world, where “days fill with splendor, and earth offers its pristine beauty to an expanding present.”
Gathers Bennington's essays since the death of his friend Jacques Derrida in 2004. These 16 continue the work of elucidating Derrida's difficult and complex thought, often with reference to his persistent interrogation of the concepts of life and death, mourning and melancholia, and what he sometimes calls 'half-mourning'. Bennington relates these to the core concepts in Derrida's work: deconstruction and differance. Derrida's suspension of the end - in differance, in death - has wide-ranging consequences for our thinking and how we attempt to categorise that thinking, whether as epistemological, ethical, political, aesthetic.Not Half No End moves through Derrida's rich and varied corpus in a weave of styles, from the expository and analytical to the autobiographical and confessional, in the ongoing process of deconstruction.
This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
