He had a beautiful new girlfriend and sudden prosperity as an author. But when he adopts an orphaned infant mouse, his world is turned on its head. The mouse comes to symbolize everything left unresolved in his life — his relationship with his divorced parents, his fear of family and commitment, and his inability to feel true happiness and love. By turns hilarious and moving, Mishka Shubaly’s latest Kindle Single captures the journey we all take in life — from being loved, to giving love. Cover by Adil Dara.

     She was a gifted midwestern beauty, the daughter of Ohio State University's marching band director: to dance on Broadway. Soon after high school graduation, Catherine left Columbus for New York City, determined to be a star. Three years later, she was dead -- murdered in cold blood in her East Side apartment. The shocking revelations that emerged from the police investigation made tabloid headlines: few knew that the struggling artist paid her bills by dancing in a topless club. But there was another hidden facet to Catherine's life -- a shattering love triangle with two men, one of whom would ultimately be convicted of her brutal stabbing death. It's a chilling account of obsession, violence, and the surprising, minute evidence on which the entire case hinged. For a talented young woman reaching for the top, and the heartbroken family she left behind, it is truly the death of a dream.

    As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library JournalIn her eleventh collection, National Book Award–winning poet Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to ancient remains, Valentine searches out ideas and explores the unexplainable. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way."From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them":At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold anddamp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking ifthey had any heaters. They had one heater. You areill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.*Can you breathe all right?Break the glass shoutbreak the glass force the roombreak the thread Openthe music behind the glass . . .Jean Valentine is the state poet of New York. She has earned many honors, including the National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.

    Informed in part by Gnostic concepts of the separate soul in search of its divine origins ("spirit held by matter"). This dualistic vision is cast in contemporary terms and seeks resolution of these tensions through acceptance.

    Among the poems he left behind are a particularly unsettling four that feature the mysterious Robinson: both a prototypical member of the smart set—masking his desperation with urbane savoir-faire—and an alter ego for the troubled Kees himself.In ROBINSON ALONE, Kathleen Rooney performs a bold act of literary mediumship, conjuring Kees through his borrowed character to sketch his restless journey across locales and milieus—New York, San Francisco, the highways between—and to evoke his ambitions, his frustrations, and his skewed humor. The product of a decade-long engagement with Kees and his work, this novel in poems is not only a portrait of an under-appreciated genius and his era, but also a beam flashed into haunted boiler-rooms that still fire the American spirit, rooms where energy and optimism are burnt down to ash.

    Essays 'bout charm, beauty and style, chewin' the fat, love, parenting, and more--full of yes ma'ams and no sirs, casseroles and cheese balls, taffeta and pom-poms . . . plus more Southern phrases than you can shake a stick at.If you're not from the South, bless your heart, pay attention cause there's a ton of wisdom to be found in these heartfelt, humorous ways. Southerners speak their own unique version of the English language, and you'll come to understand it in these pages. It's a linguistic art. And it's gooder than grits, y'all.South Carolina native, Julia Fowler, is the creator of YouTube's Southern Women Channel, home of the viral video series, Sh%t Southern Women Say. She is an actor, writer, and producer who has worked in television, film, and on Broadway. She currently resides in Venice Beach, California, and is generally irritated that it's void of proper fried okra. Visit her at www.southernwomenchannel.com.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Howe's theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation. Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe's mother, is the home of O'Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems. The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe's unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul: Zero built a nest in my navel. Incurable Longing. Blood too— From violent actions It's a nest belonging to one But zero uses it And its pleasure is its own—from The Quietist

    Likewise Swensen’s lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing—and reading—offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down.From “The Invention of Streetlights”Certain cells, it’s said, can generate light on their own.There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin.and light entire rooms. .Throughout the Middle Ages, you could hire a man.on any corner with a torch to light you home. were lamps made of horn.and from above a loom of moving flares, we watched.Notre Dame seem small. .Now the streets stand still. .By 1890, it took a pound of powdered magnesium.to photograph a midnight ball.“Goest, sonorous with a hovering ‘ghost’ which shimmers at the root of all things, is a stunning meditation—even initiation—on the act of seeing, proprioception, and the alchemical properties of light as it exists naturally and inside the human realm of history, lore, invention and the ‘whites’ of painting. Light becomes the true mistress and possibly the underlying language of all invention. Swensen’s poetry documents a penetrating ‘intellectus’—light of the mind—by turns fragile, incandescent, transcendent.”—Anne Waldman

    They have become one of the most influential British rock bands of their generation, sharing with their fans a belief that music can inspire change. Dear Future Historians features front-man Rou Reynolds own song interpretations and social commentary alongside all of their lyrics to date.

    The piece was so hauntingly beautiful that it quickly went viral, giving birth to a non-profit organization of the same name. Now, To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) is an internationally recognized leader in suicide prevention and a source of hope, encouragement, and support for people worldwide.If You Feel Too Much is a celebration of hope, wonder, and what it means to be human. From personal stories of struggling on days most people celebrate to words of strength and encouragement in moments of loss, the essays in this book invite readers to believe that it’s okay to admit to pain and okay to ask for help. If You Feel Too Much is an important book from one of this generation’s most important voices.

    It was nominated for all three major American book awards: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the American Book Award.

    And in the process of building myself back up, I learned that you are allowed to leave some pieces behind-you are allowed to become the person you design yourself to be.'A collection of notes and poetic reflections, journaling how April learned to let go of everything that was holding her back in order to grow into the person she deserved to become.Bloom for Yourself II is a book you can plant in your soul and return to each time you feel ready to let go and grow.April Green's second book in the 'Bloom for Yourself' series gives readers even more help and guidance in overcoming pain and heartache. Her words are shared by thousands of people all over the world, including Jenna Dewan and Shantel Vansanten.The 'Bloom for Yourself' books are written for anyone feeling lost, alone, depressed or unworthy. They are books to be read many times over as you come to experience April's extraordinary gift for helping you understand that you are never truly alone.

    Essays. Much admired by her contemporaries for her experiments in poetic form, Kristin Prevallet now turns those gifts to the most vulnerable moments of her own life, and in doing so, has produced a testament that is both disconsolate and powerful. Meditating on her father's unexplained suicide, Prevallet alternates between the clinical language of the crime report and the lyricism of the elegy. Throughout, she offers a defiant refusal of east consolations or redemptions. Driven by the need to extend beyond the personal and out the toward the intolerable present, Prevallet brings herself and her readers to the chilling but transcendent place where, as she promises, darkness has its own resolutions. According to Fanny Howe, here elegy and essay converge and there is left a beautiful sense of the poetic itself as all that is left to comfort a person facing a catastrophic loss. This is the quietest and most intimate book by one of our best poets--Forest Gander.

    Whether tender or hard-hitting, McGriff juxtaposes natural images of deep forests, creeks, coyotes, and crows against the harsher oil-grease realities of blue-collar life, creating poems that read like folk tales about the people working in grain mills, forests, and factories."New Civilian"The new law says you can abandon your childin an emergency room,no questions asked. The young fathercarries the sleeping boythrough the hospital doors.Later, alone, parked at the boat basin,he takes a knife from his pocket,cuts an unfiltered cigarette in two,lights the longer half in his mouth.He was a medic in the war.In his basement are five bronze eaglesthat once adorned the wallsof a dictator's palace.Michael McGriff attended the University of Oregon; the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in creative writing; and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow. He is the co-founding editor and publisher of Tavern Books and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.