TV nerds have "The Walking Dead." Fiction fans have World War Z. Now, a cross-section of some of the best contemporary poets from the stage and the page rise up and shamble their way through an anthology of post-apocalyptic zombie poetry edited by Write Bloody author and GeekWeek.com personality Rob "Ratpack Slim" Sturma. Funny, creepy, shocking, and even poignant, this collection challenges award winning authors like Scott Woods, Laura Yes Yes, and Khary Jackson to shake the dust off of old conventions, pull the triggers on their imaginations, and...Aim For The Head.

    With a wild and inquisitive lyricism, Willis—“one of the most outstanding poets of her generation” (Susan Howe)—draws us into intricate patterns of thought and feeling. The intimate and civic address of these poems is laced with subterranean affinities among painters, botanists, politicians, witches and agitators. Coursing through this work is the clarity and resistance of a world that asks the poem to rise to this, to speak its fury.

    Poetry for those wishing to know someone special while seeking the greater challenge to know themselves.

    What do Postman Pat, Tommy Cooper, Norman Wisdom and George Best have in common with being abandoned in a Costa Rican jungle after a severe bout of flatulence? Indeed, how are they also connected to trying to buy an Australian brewery just to get a beer, owning twenty-two cars, an American soccer team and a Swiss mail-order pornography company?The common feature is of course a certain Richard Wakeman.The Further Adventures of a Grumpy Old Rock Star takes you, the privileged reader, on a trip of absurd excess, a cultural car crash of side-splitting hilarity and an unforgettable glimpse (again) into the life of one of Britain's most legendary showmen, rock stars and all-time great raconteurs.

    

    What results is a whimsical anthology that brings to mind the challenges of just being human and fitting into a world that sometimes feels like a tight squeeze.

    From the son of a sharecropper to an itinerant bluesman, Honeyboy’s stories of good friends Charlie Patton, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter Jacobs, and Robert Johnson are a godsend to blues fans. History buffs will marvel at his unique perspective and firsthand accounts of the 1927 Mississippi River flood, vagrancy laws, makeshift courts in the back of seed stores, plantation life, and the Depression.

    A potpourri of musings assembled with a hint of practical spirituality, to be savoured passably as an oracle of hearts to the many answers, whose questions our minds are yet to comprehend. Ivory Gleam is split into three chapters of learning, longing and loving. Each chapter is a journey traversing a different road to the ultimate destination of self-reflection.

    Covering Sid's early years in South Africa and life as a ladies' hairdresser, his obsession with gambling and women, his questioning by Scotland Yard in a murder case, Hancock's Half Hour and the Carry On films, and Sid's death on stage at the age of 63, Cliff Goodwin reveals the amazing truth behing the legend.

    Arranged alphabetically, One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem presents an overview of his considerable achievement as a chronicler of modern life: the romance, the break-ups, the aspirations, the changing attitudes, the history, the politics, the pain. The landscape of Tennant's lyrics is recognisably British in character - restrained and preoccupied with the mundane, occasionally satirical, yet also yearning for escape and theatrical release. Often surprisingly revealing, this volume is contextualised by a personal commentary on each lyric and an introduction by the author which gives a fascinating insight into the process and genesis of writing. Flamboyant, understated, celebratory and elegiac, Neil Tennant's lyrics are a document of our times.

    The Early Years collects the lyrics—formative and classic—from the first ten albums of this true bard of hard living. A celebration of both his words and of the artist himself, this lyrical biography charts the course from Wait's emotional debut album, Closing Time (1977), to the experimental stirrings in Heartattack and Vine (1991) and One from the Heart (1992). Here the words achieve a new potency, adding further dimension to this singularly gifted artist.

    Now with an expanded examination of opera as an institution in the twenty-first century, this “lucid and sweeping” (Boston Globe) narrative explores the tensions that have sustained opera over four hundred years: between words and music, character and singer, inattention and absorption. Abbate and Parker argue that, though the genre’s most popular and enduring works were almost all written in a distant European past, opera continues to change the viewer— physically, emotionally, intellectually—with its enduring power.

    The follow-up to Stuff I've Been Feeling Lately contains anthem-like poems about relationships, mental health, current social issues, and learning from loss, with the promise that recovery is possible.The reader's experience with this unique collection is lifted from the page as Cook has collaborated with a number of up and coming musicians to transform some of her poetry into song. Like her debut book, this one is divided into two parts. Modeled after a vinyl record this time, the collection is separated into the EP record, holding Cook's shorter poetry, and the LP record, holding Cook's longer poetry, prose, and songwriting. Together, they form an inspiring collection for all those recovering from something.

    Anselmi covers the bands and musicians that have impacted those styles most―Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Melvins, Eyehategod, Godflesh, Neurosis, Saint Vitus, and many others―while diving into the cultural doom that has spawned such music, from the bombing of Birmingham and hurricane devastation of New Orleans to glaring economic inequality, industrial alienation, climate change, and widespread addiction. Along the way, Anselmi interweaves the musical experiences that have led him to proudly identify as one of the doomed.

    As I crossed over to the other side of forty, I found myself constantly wondering, "Is this it? Is it all there is for me? All those sacrifices that I made as a woman, have they really been worth it?" I was constantly dealing with self-created issues of love, vulnerabilities, and self-worth. On one such day, as I sat under a beautiful, half-naked maple tree, I found myself in the middle of a stark contradiction between the ethereal beauty of nature surrounding my body and the dark shadows of emotions surrounding my mind. As I tried to make peace between the two, my eyes fell on a fallen autumn leaf. There, it lay… Quivering yet unafraid  completely devoid of any shame It let the earth embrace its pain ‘cause in healing, there is no shame. When I turned the leaf over I found my face smiling back at me And just like that on that autumn day I found a piece of my broken me.
And from that day, I began collecting my broken pieces. ‘Unsaid’ is a collection of these broken pieces in the form of poetry & prose. I offer this book as a memoir of my learnings and realizations with the hope that these thoughts will speak to you in the same way they spoke to me. And however sketchy or incomplete these learnings may be, I offer them with complete humility and gratitude.  We live our lives thinking that all that we are doing will one day be worth it. Well, that one day is today. Has it been worth it?