Perhaps Bernadette Mayer's greatest work, Midwinter Day was written on December 22, 1978, at 100 Main Street, in Lenox, Massachusetts. "Midwinter Day", as Alice Notley notes, "is an epic poem about a daily routine". In six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day -- morning, afternoon, evening, night -- to dreams again: "a plain introduction to modes of love and reason, / Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season / Now I've said this love it's all I can remember / Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December".
USA Today bestseller Tiffany Reisz turns back the clock on her Original Sinners series to the Victorian era in this kinky Christmas romance… Two days before Christmas 1871, the newly-minted Baron Marcus Stearns returns to London for the reading of his long-estranged and much-despised father’s will, fully certain he will inherit nothing but the title. He receives the shock of his life when he learns that he and his sister Lady Claire will only inherit their late father’s vast estate if he marries—immediately. Kingsley, the Baron’s lover and devoted valet, offers a simple solution to a seemingly Herculean task—the Baron should simply marry his beautiful ward Eleanor. Yet while the Baron longs to do just that…he possesses a dangerous secret that threatens to destroy their marriage before it’s hardly begun. Written in the spirit of "Once More, With Feeling” (the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and “Atomic Shakespeare” (the legendary "Taming of the Shrew" episode of Moonlighting), comes A Midwinter Night's Dream, an Original Sinners Victorian Christmas novella.
A pet-care tycoon is felled by a pair of grooming shears in this cozy mystery set in a small Pennsylvania town. Professional pet sitter Daphne Templeton loves the holidays in Sylvan Creek, Pennsylvania. And nothing gets her into the spirit more than the town's annual Bark the Halls Ball. The whole community will be there to wag their tails, especially this year's special guest—Celeste “CeeCee” French, founder of a national chain of pet care franchises, who's returning home to announce plans for a bright new flagship store. But not everyone's celebrating CeeCee's homecoming. Daphne's friend Moxie Bloom, owner of Spa and Paw, a unique salon for people and their pets, has plenty to growl about. So when CeeCee is found face down under Sylvan Creek's town Christmas tree, stabbed with a distinctive pair of professional-grade pet shears, suspicion lands squarely on Moxie. Despite Daphne's promises to Detective Jonathan Black, she quickly reprises her role as amateur sleuth. Ably assisted by her basset hound sidekick, Socrates, she must hurry to prove her friend's innocence before a killer barks again . . . Includes recipes for homemade pet treats! “Doggone charming from start to finish!” —Cleo Coyle, New York Times bestselling author on Death by Chocolate Lab
Winter's Fall is an evocative new collection of poetry by Welsh poet R.R. Wyatt. Drawing on themes of Winter, history, experience and myth, the work takes us on a journey through snow laden fields, magical animals, ghosts, clothes pegs, teenage rebellion and Tudor executions. This third collection of poetry continues in the same strong thread of his previous two books with flowing words and captivating use of the English language. This work is a joy for lovers of magical, evocative poetry.
On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer's writing of Midwinter Day, 32 women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer's book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes "to prove the day like the dream has everything in it," as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday. A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the U.S. and beyond. They wake up in bed together and spend the day writing while nursing babies, grading papers, driving home for the holidays, making meals, and gathering in bookstores and living rooms to read Midwinter Day aloud. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION declines to identify who's speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate. MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You. Poetry. Women's Studies.
As Silas Fortunato's marriage descends to a dark place, the arrival of his sister-in-law and a witching neighbor on the scene marks the beginning of an unpredictable journey to something new.
National Sylvan Theatre, Washington Monument grounds, The Community Center and Playgrounds Department and the Office of National Capital Parks present the ninth summer festival program of the 1941 season, the Washington Players in William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," produced by Bess Davis Schreiner, directed by Denis E. Connell, the music by Mendelssohn is played by the Washington Civic Orchestra conducted by Jean Manganaro, the setting and lights Harold Snyder, costumes Mary Davis.
Thomas Belson’s name has grown heavy with glory and honor. By his leadership, the nations of Thyro weathered Emperor Thaniel’s dread conquest. By his holy vows, humanity finally deadened the sorcerous shriek of the Old Religion. He walked through the World Below to arm the righteous with knowledge against it. Those who count themselves allies of goodness and grace owe Constable Thomas Belson the debt of their remembrance. But perhaps there are things worth forgetting too. How Thomas rages against the gods to whom he swore his Constable’s oath. How he laments nothing more than outliving his triumph. How he’s killed enough men to make a hard winter blush and not all of them guilty. Come to think of it, not all of them men either. Perhaps what Belson the Blessed learned in the World Below should stay between him and Hell. It was that secret that made him nail children to pillars as all the allies of goodness and grace averted their righteous gaze. Thomas Belson won his war, but he hasn’t stopped fighting in the decade since. Guilt and paranoia make him see Thaniel in every tin-pot tyrant, apocalypse in every shadow. His increasingly erratic behavior is a growing concern for the governments of Thyro. They’ve heard the rumors. They know he cries out in his sleep. The Matriarch of the New Church calls it a kindness when she absolves him of his oaths. After fifteen years of fighting, he can finally return to his family in The Confederacy to find peace. However, the powers that be have grown complacent in peace. Perhaps they watch apocalypse loom and dismiss it as shadows. Thomas Belson saw something in the World Below that drove him to atrocity, and Hell is nothing if not patient.
