These women must brave turbulent times and decide right and wrong in a hostile world too often based on color and gender. They form an alliance that lasts for generations. Pivotal in the lives of these women, big Earl loves them both and protects them, risking his own life. Coming to them from the block in New Orleans with heavy iron chains on his ankles, Earl changes their lives forever. Later he does the same for a third woman from another world. His legacy carries him into the next century as his son stands behind the Tupelo tree watching helplessly as an innocent man is lynched. The intertwining of these lives tells the story Behind the Tupelo Tree.

    the days just prior to the events depicted in the opening pages of ‘Widowmaker.’ A “prequel,” and the final installment of the Cole Matthews Trilogy, finds the wandering, gambling gunfighter besieged by bandits and troubled by dangerous ladies, taking on the Mexican Army, and thrown into a hole and buried alive...

    

    That young soldier, Albert Edward Clack, was my father.The first part of this book covers his capture near Dunkirk in 1940 and his nearly five years in the Stalag VIIIB prisoner-of-war camp. For most of this time he endured forced labour and occasional beatings in a coal mine.The second part relates his escape from the ‘March of Death’, when the Germans forced prisoners-of-war to trudge westwards through snow and ice in January, 1945. After giving his guards the slip, he was assisted out of harm’s way by front-line storm-troopers of the Red Army.Criss-crossing Poland amidst the chaos of the Soviet advance and the German retreat, he and three other escaped prisoners found refuge with Polish families, until they were put on a train to the Ukrainian port of Odessa, there to board a ship home to England.When Dad died in 1984, he left me the manuscript of this true story. I have changed some names because, even if they were still alive, it would be extremely difficult to find them 70 years later; and I have improved the literary style for ease of reading; but I have altered none of the substance of the events described. Please note that it is a short book.I had always felt proud of what Dad did in the War; but it was not until later in life that I truly appreciated how much being able to live a normal family life in freedom afterwards must have meant to him after the long years of fear and uncertainty that he endured as a POW; and it is only through editing this manuscript that I have come to realise quite what a nightmare that experience must have been, despite the optimism which rings through his text.Albert John Clack - Son & Editor

    Cheap whiskey has been his only escape from the demons that haunt his nights. But that escape has come with a heavy price. He’s lost his sergeant’s stripes and his good name, due mostly to a hard-nosed Lieutenant named Welch. How much should a man be expected to take? It’s tempting to desert and leave it all behind, but would life be any better? He’s about to find out.

    These quotes are a source of inspiration and motivation.Read these quotes to meditate and think about all the wisdom they contain.

    Carter would participate in a number of expeditions against the Comanche and other tribes in the Texas-area. It was during one of these campaigns that he was brevetted first lieutenant and awarded the Medal of Honor for his "most distinguished gallantry" against the Comanche in Blanco Canyon on a tributary of the Brazos River on October 10, 1871. He became a successful author in his later years writing several books based on his military career, including On the Border with Mackenzie (1935), as well as a series of booklets detailing his years as an Indian fighter on the Texas frontier. Carter writes: "IT IS nearly fifty years since these tragedies occurred. There are few survivors. The writer is, perhaps, the only one. This is written in the vague hope that this chronicle of the events of that period may possibly prove of some lasting and, perhaps, historical value to posterity. "The country all about the scene of these tragical events—the Texas Panhandle—was then wild, unsettled, covered with sage brush, scrub oak and chaparral, and its only inhabitants were Indians, buffalo, lobo wolves, coyotes, jack-rabbits, prairie-dogs and rattlesnakes, with here and there a few scattered herds of antelope. The railroad, that great civilizing agency, the telegraph, the telephone, and the many other marvelous inventions of man, have wrought such a wonderful transformation in our great western country that the American Indian will, if he has not already, become a race of the past, and history alone will record the remarkable deeds and strange career of an almost extinct people. With these miraculous changes has come the total extermination of the buffalo—the Indians' migratory companion and source of living—and pretty much all of the wild game that in almost countless numbers freely roamed those vast prairies. Where now the railroads girdle that country the nomadic redman lived his free and careless life and the bison thrived and roamed undisturbed at that period— where are now the appliances of modern civilization, and prosperous communities, then nothing but desolation reigned for many miles around. "In the expansion and peopling of this vast country, our little Army was most closely identified. In fact, it was the pioneer of civilization. The life was full of danger, hardships, privations, and sacrifices, little known or appreciated by the present generation. "Where populous towns, ranches and well-tilled farms, grain fields, orchards, and oil "gushers" are now located, with railroads either running through or near them, we were making trails, upon which the main roads now run, in search of hostile savages, for the purpose of punishing them or compelling them to go into the Indian reservations, and to permit the settlers, then held back by the murderous acts of these redskins, to advance and spread the civilization of the white man throughout the western tiers of counties in that far-off western panhandle of Texas."

    D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical abomination. This book, while angry and sorrowful and bewildered, has humor, constant levity and candor, and countless moments of incredible beauty." —Dave Eggers, The New York Times Book Review“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence.”—The New YorkerInspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons—where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a “factotum” for a portrait photographer—One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and “counts” of things—from baby’s teeth to chigger bites:Count your folding moneyCount the times you said you wouldn’t go backCount your debtsCount the roaches when the light comes onCount your kids after the housefireOne Big Self—originally published as a large-format limited edition that featured photographs and text—was selected by The New York Times and The Village Voice as a notable book of the year. This edition features the poem exclusively.C.D. Wright is the author of ten books of poetry, including several collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. She is a professor at Brown University.

    Invoking both the personal and the civic self, they chart uncertain new beginnings in a shattered nation. What emerges is both a poignant meditation on a daughter's relationship with her mother and a citizen's relationship to her country. from "Frontier" . . . At times, I felt sick, intoxicatedby BPA and mercury.At other times I fasted and the starsstumbled clear from the vault.Up there, the universe stands around drunk.I hope the Lord is kind to us,for we engrave our every mistake . . .

    George Oppen's New Collected Poems gathers in one volume all of the poems published in books during his lifetime (1908-84), as well as previously uncollected poems and also a selection of his unpublished work. Oppen, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, has long been acknowledged as one of America's foremost modernists. A member of the Objectivist group that flourished in the 1930s (which also included William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky), he was hailed by Ezra Pound as "a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man's sensibility and which has not been got out of any other man's book." Oppen's New Collected Poems (which replaces New Direction's earlier, smaller Collected Poems of 1975) is edited by Michael Davidson of the University of California at San Diego, who also writes an introduction to the poet's life and work and supplies generous notes that will give interested readers an understanding of the background of the individual books as well as references in the poems.

    . .--from "The Window"Lynda Hull's Collected Poems brings together her three collections--long unavailable--with a new introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, and allows, for the first time, the full scale of her achievement to be seen. Edited with Hull's husband, David Wojahn, this book contains all the poems Hull published in her lifetime, before her untimely death in 1994.Collected Poems is the first book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, which brings essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print. Each volume--chosen by series editor Mark Doty--is introduced by a poet who brings to the work a passionate admiration. The Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series brings all-but-lost masterworks of recent American poetry into the hands of a new generation of readers.

    What will happen with Tru and the baby? Will she tell Sincere about their daughter or will he find out on his own? With new significant others in the picture and drama in the streets, will Tru and Sincere finally get it together? Or will they keep running away from the love that they both share? Follow them as they struggle with love and trust.

    Fielding an ICBM wasn't one of them... INAUGURATION DAY, IN THE NEAR FUTURE: A young and optimistic president-elect shivers in the cold, waiting for the ordeal to be over. Little does she realize, the ordeal hasn't even begun. Shortly after she takes the oath, the proceedings are interrupted with shocking news: the U.S. military has detected the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. The death toll, should the weapon strike the United States: upwards of 10 million people. Her advisers warn her that there are rules to this game, ones that must be followed if there's to be any hope of avoiding global nuclear war. Adding to the problem: buried in a bunker, and surrounded by career professionals with agendas of their own, she has no idea what to believe about the conditions unfolding topside. Soon she learns that the loneliest person on the planet is the one who's trying to save billions from annihilation. An explosive, fast-paced novella from the author of The Counting series.

    Where we don't, we read, we ask, we learn and then, we solve! What happens when there are no answers though? When nobody in the world knows! When we see the need to invent Gods even if we can't discover Him. Through a string of poems, the author narrates such an experience with his non-verbal and autistic daughter, Enya. What started as a week of babysitting for him soon became a seeking to change her into 'normal'. But, that seeking ended up transforming the seeker!The narrative in the form of poetry touches upon the revelation that comes out of desperation of not finding an answer at all and therefore, the thoughts getting tired of themselves and the mind taking a back seat. In that silence, the author says, things become clear and all aspects of life show their inter-relation! The intellect gives way to the intelligence, the body and mind as 'me' gives way to the world as 'me'! The mind map once seen, one starts to see the true nature of the 'me' and that perspective and clarity make everything clear and possible in life...