You do not know it exists until you find yourself there.When Alice Jolly's second child was stillborn and all subsequent attempts to have another baby failed, she began to consider every possible option, no matter how unorthodox.Dead Babies and Seaside Towns is a savagely personal account of the search for an alternative way to create a family. As she battles through miscarriage, IVF and failed adoption attempts, Alice's only solace from the pain is the faded charm of Britain's crumbling seaside towns. Finally, this search leads her and her husband to a small town in Minnesota, and two remarkable women who offer to make the impossible possible.In this beautiful book, shot through with humour and full of hope, Alice Jolly describes with a novelist's skill events that woman live through every day – even if many feel compelled to keep them hidden. Her decision not to hide but to share them, without a trace of sentiment or self-pity, turns Dead Babies and Seaside Towns into a universal story: one that begins in tragedy but ends in joy.

    The home of the world s first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progressive, secular vision of sexual liberation. Immortalized however misleadingly in Christopher Isherwood s Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret, Weimar s freedoms have become a touchstone for the politics of sexual emancipation.Yet, as Laurie Marhoefer shows in Sex and Weimar Republic, those sexual freedoms were only obtained at the expense of a minority who were deemed sexually disordered. In Weimar Germany, the citizen s right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.Sex and the Weimar Republic examines the rise of sexual tolerance through the debates which surrounded immoral sexuality: obscenity, male homosexuality, lesbianism, transgender identity, heterosexual promiscuity, and prostitution. It follows the sexual politics of a swath of Weimar society ranging from sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld to Nazi stormtrooper Ernst Rohm. Tracing the connections between toleration and regulation, Marhoefer s observations remain relevant to the politics of sexuality today."

    "Authorities say a man was stabbed to death, decapitated and partly cannibalized in what appears to be a random act of violence on board a bus that was en route to Winnipeg late Wednesday." With these starkly haunting words from a 2008 Canadian news report, Joseph Fasano begins VINCENT, a book-length poem based on Vince Li's killing of Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus near Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. Using a fictionalized first-person narrative from the perspective of the killer, Fasano explores the inner workings of a disturbed mind trying to come to terms with a horrific act that even its perpetrator cannot fully comprehend. "Have you smelled the rose oil / in the shoes of the dead... have you woken / and woken / and woken," the speaker asks us. And the poem will not let us say no.