A Flying Frog who cannot fly? Poor little Plummet thinks he's the only one in the whole wide world. He's so sad about it, he's even lost his smile. And then he meets a fabulous Flying Frog called Be-Bop. Plummet thinks she will never be his friend. Who wants anything to do with a Flying Frog who can't get airborne? But Plummet's got Be-Bop all wrong. Soon, with her help and understanding, the sky's the limit. Follow Plummet as he goes from the saddest frog in the world to the smiliest in just 32 pages! Wonderfully illustrated by Emily Bolam, this is a perfect picture book for inspiring self-belief.
Take the plunge into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.When Amelia "Mel" Eichenwald wakes up one morning, she finds herself in endless freefall towards an Earth that is no longer there, surrounded by the junk of human existence. From high heels to houses, billions of random items drop alongside her like fallout from an exploded mall.She soon discovers she's not alone. Others have been similarly plucked out of their lives and dropped off in mid-air. But why? For what purpose? And more importantly--and urgently--what is she going to eat? Where can she safely sleep?Plummet follows Mel as she attempts to survive, find allies, and negotiating the balance between becoming prey or predator. What makes us human -- and what keeps us human --when gravity is all there is? How do you take a stand when there is literally no place to sit? Plummett will propel readers into a new dimension that's part fable, part post-apocalyptic nightmare.
Poetry. As with many books, description of Chris Nealon's latest, fails, yet in this case it also, unusually, falls. A few moments of demonstration rather than description: "nothing you read will help you now"; "I am not gay, I am from the future!"; "Classicism: build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way." Plummet is a post-catastrophic work written largely before the current all-American, i.e. global, plunge--imagine a kind of clairvoyant O'Hara distracted by Adorno, and Bear Stearns. It's that pit of the stomach feeling, when plummeting one goes from high to low--that's that pit of the stomach feeling--in the pit, of the stomach. "Will there be sirens? Toxins? I imagine violence miming reconciliation and then back again." The Believer reporter Stephen Burt observed of his previous collection The Joyous Age that "Nealon's bracing and bitter debut both enters and mocks the tradition of kaleidoscopic, difficult poetry as grand social critique, and makes most new work in that mode sound sloppy or bland by contrast." In other words, as it says in this new collection "Lifted from the cadences you know and then let fall.
This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works. At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert’s exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as ‘the church's banquet’, ‘reversed thunder’, ‘the Milky Way’, ‘the bird of paradise’ and ‘something understood’. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm’s sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions. Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.
The Santa Cruz River that once flowed through Tucson, Arizona is today a sad mirage of a river. Except for brief periods following heavy rainfall, it is bone dry. The cottonwood and willow trees that once lined its banks have died, and the profusion of birds and wildlife recorded by early settlers are nowhere to be seen. The river is dead. What happened? Where did the water go. As Robert Glennon explains in Water Follies, what killed the Santa Cruz River -- and could devastate other surface waters across the United States -- was groundwater pumping. From 1940 to 2000, the volume of water drawn annually from underground aquifers in Tucson jumped more than six-fold, from 50,000 to 330,000 acre-feet per year. And Tucson is hardly an exception -- similar increases in groundwater pumping have occurred across the country and around the world. In a striking collection of stories that bring to life the human and natural consequences of our growing national thirst, Robert Glennon provides an occasionally wry and always fascinating account of groundwater pumping and the environmental problems it causes. Robert Glennon sketches the culture of water use in the United States, explaining how and why we are growing increasingly reliant on groundwater. He uses the examples of the Santa Cruz and San Pedro rivers in Arizona to illustrate the science of hydrology and the legal aspects of water use and conflicts. Following that, he offers a dozen stories -- ranging from Down East Maine to San Antonio's River Walk to Atlanta's burgeoning suburbs -- that clearly illustrate the array of problems caused by groundwater pumping. Each episode poses a conflict of values that reveals the complexity of how and why we use water. These poignant and sometimes perverse tales tell of human foibles including greed, stubbornness, and, especially, the unlimited human capacity to ignore reality. As Robert Glennon explores the folly of our actions and the laws governing them, he suggests common-sense legal and policy reforms that could help avert potentially catastrophic future effects. Water Follies, the first book to focus on the impact of groundwater pumping on the environment, brings this widespread but underappreciated problem to the attention of citizens and communities across America.
Cincinnati Magazine taps into the DNA of the city, exploring shopping, dining, living, and culture and giving readers a ringside seat on the issues shaping the region.
