One of Betches' 7 Books by Black Authors You Need to Read This Summer One of Elite Daily’s Books Featuring Interracial Relationships You Should Read In 2020 One of Marie Claire’s 2020 Books You Should Add to Your Reading List When a Nigerian woman falls for a man she knows will break her mother’s heart, she must choose between love and her family. At twelve years old, Azere promised her dying father she would marry a Nigerian man and preserve her culture, even after immigrating to Canada. Her mother has been vigilant about helping—well forcing—her to stay within the Nigerian dating pool ever since. But when another match-made-by-mom goes wrong, Azere ends up at a bar, enjoying the company and later sharing the bed of Rafael Castellano, a man who is tall, handsome, and…white. When their one-night stand unexpectedly evolves into something serious, Azere is caught between her feelings for Rafael and the compulsive need to please her mother. Soon, Azere can't help wondering if loving Rafael makes her any less of a Nigerian. Can she be with him without compromising her identity? The answer will either cause Azere to be audacious and fight for her happiness or continue as the compliant daughter.
Poetry. Women's Studies. "In TETHER, a spacecraft of a book superbly conceived and assembled, Lisa Fay Coutley engineers both recovery and healing in poems that swerve emotionally between the landing bays of grief, longing, and wonder. A bright hunger constellates around these poems, but so too the immensities of love. TETHER is a burning inquiry into the miracle of being here on earth and what keeps us fastened to each other, for better or worse."--Major Jackson "Lisa Fay Coutley's TETHER is characterized by a compressed tension, each line, each word, hitched to the next, quivering with the effort to remain connected and with the opposing desire to be released. The image of the tether accrues intensity in the course of the book: astronaut tethered to the ship, poet to the poem, mother to the homeless, addict child and child to the mother, and in the space between 'the two / great opposing poles' is God, who learns, in that chasm, 'wonder & suffering.' Indeed, oppositional forces reign in these poems; there are no conventional false resolutions to be had. 'Every event / that's saved my life has nearly killed me,' the speaker declares, and 'I would rather live / with my burning than sleep with my dead.' This is a far-reaching book, a political book, a deeply personal and heroic book. Its thesis is reflected in its enviably honed diction. 'Mystery is her / bitch,' the speaker writes of the eclipsing sun. The same is true of Lisa Fay Coutley and the ravishing poems of tether."--Diane Seuss "TETHER is a book of distances and intimacies, of letters never sent and dream talks and delayed communiques. It is a study of distance between us,between an astronaut and a poet, between lovers, between ourselves and eachother, ourselves and ourselves. 'We are the beached boat / with a hole inits hull,' admits the poet. Each of us, even as 'baby in a womb is a cloud.' And yet there is so much love. And yet, everything that happens tous, happens for a purpose. And when one turns worthy, a giant squid washes ashore.It is this knowing, this insight into our distances (of years, of geography, of a space of a single day) here that I find compelling: '& how far / must you back away / from yourself / to see / yourself / as the Astronaut / sees/ Earth.' Beautiful work."--Ilya Kaminsky "Just over a full column of definitions for 'tether' in the OED, among which are those that suggest diametrically opposite forms of fastening. It's fascinating to read through them, but not nearly so compelling as it is to read the poems in Lisa Fay Coutley's TETHER. We are tied, ensnared, and attached--in an especially intimate sense of that word--to everything that matters, which Coutley knows and makes us see and, in the richest sense of this word, feel. This is a superb book of poems."--Robert Wrigley "Is it desire, wonder, duty, or memory that keeps us most firmly tethered to the world, where 'truth is every bird starving,' and we live in constant awareness of all the forces that threaten to break the bonds between us and our loved ones? A mother's death, a son's drug addiction, the disastrous world news filtered daily through the internet: how do we reconcile the painful events that define our existence with our hope for a more secure future? Through sinewy, sometimes hallucinogenic syntax that threatens to (but never does) spin out of control, TETHER's poems examine a contemporary and very human paradox, in which we long to absent ourselves from our grief, while also needing to document our losses so as to ensure we won't forget. TETHER reminds us that we are formed as much from pain as from delight and that, in her ability to look back upon her past, upon today's terrible and compelling news, the contemporary poet is like an astronaut, able to regard the world 'from a great height,' a witness to what most of us cannot bear to see."--Paisley Rekdal
Sasha returns to Aurora, the parallel universe of generals, princesses, body doubles, and the boy she loves, Thomas, where she tries to help and find missing people and save them all.
Michel van Pelt explains for the first time the principle of space tethers: what they are and how they can be used in space. He introduces non-technical space enthusiasts to the various possibilities and feasibility of space tethers including the technological challenges and potential benefits. He illustrates how, because of their inherent simplicity, space tethers have the potential to make space travel much cheaper, while ongoing advances in tether material technology may make even seemingly far-fetched ideas a reality in the not too distant future.
Readers familiar with Lia Purpura’s highly praised essay collections—Becoming, On Looking, and Rough Likeness—will know she’s a master of observation, a writer obsessed with the interplay between humans and the things they see. The subject matter of All the Fierce Tethers is wonderfully varied, both low (muskrats, slugs, a stained quilt in a motel room) and lofty (shadows, prayer, the idea of beauty). In “Treatise Against Irony,” she counters this all-too modern affliction with ferocious optimism and intelligence: “The opposite of irony is nakedness.” In “My Eagles,” our nation’s symbol is viewed from all angles—nesting, flying, politicized, preserved. The essay in itself could be a small anthology. And, in a fresh move, Purpura turns to her own, racially divided Baltimore neighborhood, where a blood stain appears on a street separating East (with its Value Village) and West (with its community garden). Finalist for the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Pushcart Prize, Lia Purpura returns with a collection both sustaining and challenging.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of recently developed space multi-tethers, such as maneuverable space tethered nets and space tethered formation. For each application, it provides detailed derivatives to describe and analyze the mathematical model of the system, and then discusses the design and proof of different control schemes for various problems. The dynamics modeling presented is based on Newton and Lagrangian mechanics, and the book also introduces Hamilton mechanics and Poincaré surface of section for dynamics analysis, and employs both centralized and distributed controllers to derive the formation question of the multi-tethered system. In addition to the equations and text, it includes 3D design drawings, schematic diagrams, control scheme blocks and tables to make it easy to understand. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in the fields of astronautics, control science, and engineering.
