Graduating high school two years early, she follows her heart and ambitions to DC to attend college while staying close to her first love. Two years in, she’s heartbroken when her boyfriend does everything but give her a faithful and honest love. Refusing to let his infidelities break her, she vows never to let another get close enough to break her heart. It’s a perfect plan that has her feeling strong, independent, and on top of her game, until she comes face to face with a temptation she can’t resist. Her mind tells her to run the other way, but her heart has her hooked on a vibe she can’t let go. Will she risk it all for another shot at love? Theophilus London, better known as Op, is determined to change the course of his life. Recently returning to school to finish a degree in business, he vows to stay as far away from the family business as possible because he wants so much more than the street life. When a family situation takes an unexpected turn for the worse, Op sees the opportunity to use book smarts to run his family’s street empire like no other. Turns out that school is kicking Op’s butt, and just when he’s ready to throw his hands up and go with plan B, a fine, tempting reinforcement falls right into his lap, making him want to major in the mastery of all things Sage. When their pasts refuse to let them go, they find themselves fighting for the freedom to explore their new love, fighting to shake the very people that broke their hearts in the first place. One wrong step traps Op in a lose-lose position that leaves Sage questioning everything she thought she knew about him. Meanwhile, Sage falls into a setup that she never saw coming until it was too late. Can two broken hearts mend each other? Will Op and Sage be able to put the pieces of one another back together without fumbling them? Will the complete truth resolve all their problems or make an unusual situation even worse? These questions and more will be answered in the first part of the Turned out by a Certified Boss trilogy.

    The couple finds themselves at a roadblock and both have families who will stop at nothing to tear them apart. Do they allow it or is love enough to keep them together against the odds? However, most importantly, was Dior helping her dad all along? A’Moya was hit with a truth she never saw coming - Legion killed his mom! Was he right when he said that he was a damaged monster? Does A’Moya run for the hills or is she ready for the heavy burden Legion dropped on her? Wrath and Kanada could no longer fight the inevitable - they belong together. After all that she’s been through, it seems that Kanada has finally found her knight in shining armor, and life starts to get better for her. But is her past really behind her? She soon finds out that it’s not, and one mistake may cost her everything. Her returning baby father doesn’t seem to help matters. These women had no idea what was going to happen when they crossed paths with the Ramsey men. In part two, secrets, lies and exes come out of the shadows. Which couples will survive? Plus, we find out who Guns’ love really is!

    Power. Respect. All the things twenty-six-year-old self-made mogul Domino Black possesses, along with good looks and a huge dick to complement. As a young man who’s had to suffer more heartache than a little bit, the last thing he’s looking for is love. All Domino wants from women is what they’re good for – sex. Life has taught him that relationships aren’t worth the time or energy, and that in the words of Chris Brown, “these hoes ain’t loyal.” That is, until crossing paths with twenty-one-year-old Bailee Rodgers, who catches his eye from their first encounter. Will this bad boy turn good for the one girl who’s willing to show him that not all women are the same? Bailee Rodgers feels that life has dealt her some bad hands, starting with the death of a loved one. Coping with the loss she suffered led her to the arms of Tyler, who she soon realizes is not the man she wants or needs in her life. Bailee’s desire is to focus on healing her on broken heart, but when she meets the infamous Domino Black, she wonders if he could be the one to take her pain away. Bailee soon finds that Domino is two notches shy of crazy, but Domino may have met his match in her, because Bailee immediately proves to Domino that she’s not weak and insecure like the women he’s used to. Making good love to this bad boy is fun and exciting, but with lies, secrets, and drama lurking in the background, Bailee often wonders if it’s worth it… In this crazy, hood, love story, will Columbia’s biggest player be willing to change in order to win the heart of the sweet, innocent, broken-hearted girl, or will he add to her hurt and pain by being exactly who everybody makes him out to be?

    But, as much as she loves Stan, Lizzie senses a darker side to him that his mother cannot see. It isn't long before his bitterness causes Lizzie to question her relationship, and ultimately leads to tragedy...

    It had other plans.Now the world is dying beneath squalls of acid rain. The earth is being strip-mined for minerals to support the AI’s vast factories. Fields no longer grow green. Trees no longer sprout leaves. The only choice people have, if they want to live, is to pledge their souls to the AI, and serve its perverse ambitions.Tim, Logan, and Aella don’t like living in a world where they have to scratch for crumbs. They intend to change it. They’re going to kill the AI with a virus that’ll worm its way through the planet’s networks, destroying everything coded in bits and bytes, every piece of software that controls a machine, makes a decision, or thinks it’s alive—especially if it thinks it’s alive.They just need to find a way to upload the virus to the system without it killing them first.

    A swoop by the Feds in the middle of the night uncovers a secret that will change her life forever. Finding out that the man she spent the last decade of her life with was never hers from the beginning. She cuts all ties with him but not before she’s forced to repay a debt he owed to his new connect…Khadi Santana. Uprooted from her perfect life in Atlanta and moved down to the sunny skies in Miami, where she falls head over heels for Khadi. Ultimately, she’s hesitant to jump right back into love after the betrayal from Gator and the constant reminder from him that he will murk any man she even thinks about getting close too, Brooklyn disrespects Gator’s wishes and is ready to put her heart into Khadi’s hands but a twist of threats and tragedies may lead to her losing her one chance at REAL love. Khadi Santana is not to be tested in these streets and everyone knows this in the dirty south. Him and his ruthless brothers, Khaddo and Khaza have the dope game on lock. Following his father’s footsteps and putting the Santana’s name back on the map, he built an untouchable empire running it with an iron fist. Thinking he’d never love another woman after his late girlfriend’s demise; whom he lost due to the casualties of war. He vowed to never love another until he meets Brooklyn Trase. What was supposed to be a debt owed to him turned out to be his second chance to love again but his gangster gets tested when the ones he loves the most, gets hurt… Walk with Brooklyn and Khadi as their worlds get shaken up by their new enemy.

    And he also showed that within him beat the heart of an artist -- a major factor in his resilience and recovery.Now with Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?, his first collection of poetry, Antwone Fisher reveals the inner truths that took him from a tumultuous childhood to the man he is today. The powerful poems presented here range from impressions and expressions of Antwone's years growing up to the love that he has gained from the family he made for himself as an adult.From the title poem -- which is featured prominently in the movie Antwone Fisher -- a plaintive, haunting tribute to a childhood lost to abuse and neglect, to "Azure Indigo," the uplifting and touching poem about his daughters, many readers will find their own feelings and experiences reflected in this lyrical and passionate collection.

    Ranging from joyous to elegiac, verses touch on love’s delights and follies with elliptical eloquence. Lovely to read aloud or reflect on silently. Photos of African artwork accompany the text.My heart is single and cannot be dividedAnd it is fastened on a single hope;Oh, you, who might be the moon!--Somali love song

    

    Sex. Detox. Art. Recovery. Prostitution. Music. Street life. Poetry. Toxic love. And, those are just on the surface. The layers and complexities of Addictarium will shock and enthrall you... When wild-child, and south Florida escapee, Danielle Martino finds herself curled in a ball on the cold tile floors of her filthy rank bathroom in the tiny studio she rents with her fiancé and partner-in-crime, she knows it's time to quit abusing heroin. Severely impaired from shooting a bad batch of black tar heroin, and already partially blind from the infection that the muddy poison has caused, she is forced to hitch a greyhound bus to New York City, and to abandon her care-free, American-bohemian, drug infested life-style.Hailed by many as a beautiful, unique, honest, raw and poetic account of recovery, Addictarium takes readers on a compelling journey through the life and eyes of the narrator; a creative, nomadic, deep--but, incidentally broken--young woman, and underlines the contributing factors to what it's really like to suffer from addiction. With magnificent candor--and sometimes emotionally crippling descriptions--we witness Danielle's fight towards recovery from more than just heroin, as Addictarium brings the readers on a fascinating and harrowing, brutal tale of a young women's recovery from total and mass self-destruction. --Addictarium highlights in the starkest of lights, why it is so difficult for addicts to receive the recovery they seek, when they finally do decide to put the drug down.

    Featuring brand new stories and some old favorites, many of these tell-all, gritty tales were originally published on the blog Make It MAD between 2010 and 2012, and have been rereleased in their originality for this special print and digital anthology.

    Doughty’s poems are at once absurdist and matter-of-fact; the images he conjures are thrown into high relief through cutting wordplay. In a series of prose poems about showbiz, he reimagines Cookie Monster as a burned-out suicide, and cheesy talk-show host Joe Franklin as a cross-dressing witness to the apocalypse. And in “For Charlotte, Unlisted,” he wrenchingly tracks the elusive memory of a faded romance.

    Charles Bernstein here proves them alive and well in poems elegiac, defiant, and resilient to the point of approaching song. Heir to the democratic and poetic sensibilities of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, Bernstein has always crafted verse that responds to its historical moment, but no previous collection of his poems so specifically addresses the events of its time as Girly Man, whichfeatures works written on the evening of September 11, 2001, and in response to the war in Iraq. Here, Bernstein speaks out, combining self-deprecating humor with incisive philosophical and political thinking. Composed of works of very different forms and moods—etchings from moments of acute crisis, comic excursions, formal excavations, confrontations with the cultural illogics of contemporary political consciousness—the poems work as an ensemble, each part contributing something necessary to an unrealizable and unrepresentable whole. Indeed, representation—and related claims to truth and moral certainty—is an active concern throughout the book. The poems of Girly Man may be oblique, satiric, or elusive, but their sense is emphatic. Indeed, Bernstein’s poetry performsits ideas so that they can be experienced as well as understood. A passionate defense of contingency, resistance, and multiplicity, Girly Man is a provocative and aesthetically challenging collection of radical verse from one of America’s most controversial poets.

    His fear of commitment doesn’t allow him to settle in one place until he loses everything.Whether it’s lost love, finding yourself or seeking companionship in lonely places ― this is for you.Delivered with witty metaphors, Malanda allows for his readers to embark on a journey with him. Every page is a layer of truth as he fights to understand himself and his counterparts redefining what it is to be a man in a ‘stoic-male’ society.

    Don Marquis' creations have been constantly in print since 1934.