But when it comes to her giving the same in return, she falls short. Irulan wants to feel a connection, but all she keeps getting is relationships full of emptiness. After tying on one too many drinks, a simple joke turns into a bet that Irulan never intended to follow through on. Falling for one of her closest friends was not in the cards for her, especially since that friend is Mason Andrews. Mason Andrews is strong, confident and as handsome as they come, but he struggles in the love department. He has yet to find a woman that can give him everything that he needs, but he’s working overtime to hide the way he feels about a certain someone. Mason has known Irulan since they were teenagers and he’s trained himself to believe that there’s nothing romantic between them, but one night of curiosity proves him wrong. Now, Irulan and Mason are forced to deal with their feelings for each other, but a past fling is determined to keep them apart. With trouble on the horizon, Mason and Irulan must fight harder than ever before. Will they be able to handle what’s coming their way? Or will their happily ever after end before it even begins?

    One of the most challenging poets writing today, Graham is no easy read, but the rewards are well worth the effort. While thematically present, her concern is not exclusively the demise of natural resources and depletion of species, but the philosophical and perceptual difficulty in capturing and depicting a physical world that may be lost, or one that we humans have limited sight of and into. As she notes in "The Taken-Down God": "We wish to not be erased from the / picture. We wish to picture the erasure. The human earth and its appearance. / The human and its disappearance."With a style that is fragmented and somewhat whirling--language dips and darts and asides are taken--Graham stays on point and presents an honest intellect at work, fumbling for an accurate understanding (or description) of the natural world, self-conscious about the limitations of language and perception.

    Asian American Studies. "In YOU ARE NOT DEAD Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book."--James Tate"There's a wild and wondrous poet plundering-through our lives, collecting the oddest and most significant things, turning our thoughts toward things we couldn't have known before she turned us toward them. YOU ARE NOT DEAD is precisely how this book can get you to feel and that is an almost otherworldly power. The poet who imagines and builds these poems is irresistible."--Dara Wier"That fluctuating space between the temporary and the infinite is an erogenous zone made all the more enticing when articulated so eloquently. 'We have a lifespan and O how we live it out.' Wendy Xu's poems posit for us a future, a presence, a body resistant to the ravages of time. Mortality is a far planet. Here in Xu's work, we are passionately, and gratefully, alive."--D. A. Powell

    As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, "the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what." It is an antagonist--and it is a part of the self. Ritvo's poems ring with considered reflection on the enduring final question, while suggesting--in their vibrancy and their humor--that death is not merely an end.The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful--and completely breathtaking--second collection.

    West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities--to their portrayal in the media--and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http: //sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.

    D. A. Powell What is it about the poems in Red Sugar, Jan Beatty's astonishing third collection, that brings to mind the incomparable music of Miles Davis? 'It's just that I can't play like anybody else... I can't do anything like anybody else, ' Davis insisted. These poems go their own sure way, making their own fierce music, charting 'the fluid stages of / empire & slavery' in the human body, yours and mine, as we rehearse our sometimes sorry but always necessary seductions. Jan Beatty is the author of Boneshaker and Mad River, winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

    This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary, Chapter Summaries & Analysis, Characters, Objects/Places, Themes, Style, Quotes, and Topics for Discussion.

    In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Though as sanguine as ever, Zagajewski often turns to elegy in this deeply powerful collection, remembering loved ones he's lost: a hairdresser, the philosopher Krzystzof Michalski, and, most poignantly, his parents. A moving reflection on family, the sublimity of everyday life, death, and happiness, Asymmetry is a magnificent distillation of an astounding poetic voice.

    He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing us throughout this provocative and superbly written book to his current work, The17.

    Lyrically complex and startling—yet forthright and unflinching— these poems address rape, abortion, sex work, and other subjects frequently omitted from male-dominated literary traditions, without forsaking the pleasures of being embodied, or the value of personal freedom, of moonlight, and of hope. Throughout, the topography and mythology of California, as well as the uses and failures of language itself, are players in what it means to be a woman, a sexual being, and a trauma survivor in contemporary America.

    The wildly inventive imagery in these cinematic pieces lodges them somewhere between the surreal and the pure symbol, colorful and smooth like the lyrics of John Ashbery or Linda Pastan. In Chelotti’s poems, diamonds talk and sheriffs balance frogs on the tips of pens.The rain says, Listen to Debussy,go ahead, Debussy will fix you.—From “Migraine Cure”The secret to including everythingis to intricately divide your mindand then, all of a sudden,undivide it.—From “Still Life on a Scrolling Background”

    In her haunting eighth collection inspired by articles from the weekly “Science” section of the New York Times, Hahn explores identity, extinction, and survival using exotic tropes drawn from the realms of astrophysics, mycology, paleobotany, and other rarefied fields. With warmth and generosity, Hahn mines the world of science in these elegant, ardent poems.from “On Deceit as Survival”   Yet another species resembles   a female bumble bee,   ending in frustrated trysts—   or appears to be two fractious males   which also attracts—no surprise—   a third curious enough to join the fray.   What to make of highly evolved Beauty   bent on deception as survival—

    Moments that make us who we are. But what if they don't unfold the way they're supposed to...?What if you get on the wrong bus, or don't speak to the right person at a party, or stay in a job that isn't for you? Will you miss your one chance at happiness? Or will happiness find you eventually, when the moment is right?Meet Matthew and Myrtle. They have never really felt like they fitted - in life or with anyone else. But they are meant to be together - if only they can find each other.A powerful and emotional story about missed chances, interwoven lives and the moments that define us.

    Now it's time to meet the other side of the family... This bundle contains: HER WICKED HEART (Book 3)Lou just needs someone to take her away. It doesn't matter if she knows his name. Or if he knows hers.Actually, it's better if he doesn't know hers.At least that's what she tells herself when she's sticking her tongue down the throat of the sexy handyman she just met at her new job.Her father's dead. Her family's fortune is gone. And, oh yeah--she's assumed a false identity so she could get a position at Huntington Manor, the luxury tourist attraction that was once her family's estate. Nobody here knows that she's Louisa Cunningham, former heiress and current complicated head case. To them, she's just Addison Thomas, assistant to the hotel's General Manager.Well, except to handyman Ward Brannon--to him, she's the strange but intoxicating new girl who tried to have sex with him without even knowing his name.TAKE YOU AWAY (Book 3.5)Two couples. Two struggles. Two wicked stories.PART ONE:Ward Brannon would do anything to protect Louisa Cunningham. No one's ever gotten under his skin the way she has--or inspired such a hunger. But now that he knows the truth about her identity, it's becoming increasingly clear that the two of them are worlds apart. Is their explosive passion enough to hold them together?PART TWO:Lily Frazer's been through her share of ups and downs with the brooding Calder Cunningham--but she doesn't know where to begin when it comes to his guilt over his sister. She hasn't quite mastered the ability to ease his worries with her body, to make his pain disappear with her lips or hands or softly whispered words, but she's determined to try. Even if it takes all night. LOST AND FOUND (Book 4) Love on the run...Louisa Cunningham and Ward Brannon are on a mission: to escape the mess (and the families) they left behind. But life on the road is more difficult than either of them expected. Out here, there might not be any rules, but there are also no longer any secrets... and nowhere to hide from each other.The Cunningham Family Reading Order:His Wicked Games (Book 1)Truth or Dare (Book 2)Sweet Victory (Book 2.5)Her Wicked Heart (Book 3)Take You Away (Book 3.5)Lost and Found (Book 4)Completely (short story)Their Wicked Wedding (Book 5) A Cunningham Christmas (Book 5.5)

    To ride alongside your favorite horror authors as they take you on a trip you will never forget. There is no turning back.From new legends to old familiar haunts, the stories held within this tome will make you question whether anywhere is safe. Over 30 authors have crafted the most authentic and horrifying representation of each state. Not a single dark road will be left untraveled. You will never want to leave home again.