Focusing on inspiration, Doby's poetry invites its reader to "Come as you are. Your tribe has arrived.  Your breath can rest here."both softand fiercecan coexist and still be powerful

    It's a poetry book, from the perspective of a journal entry in the National Archives. The National Archives live in a building in Seattle behind barbed wire, directly next door to the Center for Spiritual Living. This is no accident. Gentleman Practice is a disarming de-haunting of accidents. There are no stunt doubles performing the honesty in this book. Head raised and victorious, he has crafted a translation of the human spirit on a small, practical patch, with a very fine tooth indeed. And, while many poetry books read like a thick epic series of sections, Gentleman Practice will no doubt rest in your hands like a well-oiled novel.

    She has rings in her ears and she sometimes comes to school in a little wagon."Kizzy Lovell is a gypsy girl. She has her gran and her horse, Joe, and she doesn't need anything else. Then Gran dies, her wagon burns, and Kizzy is left all alone - in a community that hates her.

    Seven-year-old Rita has always known she was responsible for the death of her beautiful mother Cassie. Her absent-minded father allows her to run wild in her ramshackle white wooden house by the sea, and surrounded by her army of stray pets, most of the time she can banish her mother’s death to the back of her mind.But then her new stepmother Chandra arrives and the house empties of love and laughter. Rita’s pets are removed, her freedom curtailed, and before long, there’s a new baby sister on the way. There’s no room for Rita anymore.Desperate to fill up the emptiness inside her, Rita begins to talk to the only photo she has of her dead mother, a poor farmer’s daughter from the remote Guyanese rainforest. Determined to find the truth about her mother, Rita travels to find her mother’s family in an unfamiliar land of shimmering creeks and towering vines. She finds comfort in the loving arms of her grandmother among the flowering shrubs and trees groaning with fruit. But when she discovers the terrible bruising secret that her father kept hidden from her, will she ever be able to feel happiness again?A beautiful and inspiring story that will steal your heart and open your eyes. Fans of The Secret Life of Bees, The Vanishing Half and The Other Half of Augusta Hope will be captivated by The Far Away Girl.

    With his trademark sense of humor, open-hearted empathy, and perceptive vision, Charles Simic roots his poetry in the ordinary world while still taking in the wide sweep of the human experience.From poems pithy, wry, and cutting—“Time—that murderer/that no has caught yet”—to his layered reflections on everything from love to grief to the wonders of nature, from the story of St. Sebastian to that of a couple weeding side by side, Simic’s work continues to reveal to us an unmistakable voice in modern poetry. An innovator in form and a chronicler of both our interior lives and the people we are in the world, Simic remains one of our most important and lasting voices on the page.

    

    H. Auden (1907-73) came to prominence in the 1930s among a generation of outspoken poets that included his friends Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis. But he was also an intimate and lyrical poet of great originality, and a master craftsman of some of the most cherished and influential poems of the past century.Other volumes in this series: Betjemen, Eliot, Plath, Hughes and Yeats.

    No one bats an eyelid at her ankle-length black dress (decorated with a pattern of white skulls) or her long silk gloves (black, naturally)or her hair (very long, very straight and very black). And as for her shoes (the clumpiest, highest and--you've guessed it!--blackest platforms you've ever seen) ... well, amongst the rubble and weeds of Vinegar Street, Poppy fits in just fine.Vinegar Street is no ordinary street and Poppy Picklesticks is certainly no ordinary girl, but the two complement each other perfectly. So when Mandy Nylon--all blonde hair, perfect make-up, neon-white teeth, look-at-my-curves dresses and a backside that wiggles so hard you could attach cocktail shakers to it--moves into the street, Poppy's world is rocked. Everyone is charmed by the newcomer but Poppy and the tingling voice inside her head are pretty sure that there is more to this woman than meets the eye and a battle of wills that leaves the reader pretty breathless ensues.Philip Ridley certainly has a way with words and in Vinegar Street he lets rip with a barrage of snappy dialogue and crafty prose that runs like a river of poetry across the pages and into the imagination. Older readers will simply love the sharp and snappy humour, and the tight characterization that drives the unusual and intrepid plot as it races towards its conclusion.A dream of a book for readers like their fiction with a twist, Vinegar Street is a confident and unforgettable story that lets the imagination fly. Age 11 and over. --Susan Harrison

    I have the whole night ahead of me, and I won't waste a single moment of it . . . I want tonight to be long, as long as my life . . ." For young Private Peaceful, looking back over his childhood while he is on night watch in the battlefields of the First World War, his memories are full of family life deep in the countryside: his mother, Charlie, Big Joe, and Molly, the love of his life. Too young to be enlisted, Thomas has followed his brother to war and now, every moment he spends thinking about his life, means another moment closer to danger.

    Fraud. Footie pajamas. Twins Edgar and Ellen live alone -- their parents disappeared years ago, and who can blame them? -- in the quaint, little town of Nod's Limbs, in a grim, gray house overlooking the cemetery and the junkyard. They spend their days avoiding Heimertz, the mysterious accordion-playing caretaker; pestering Pet, a hairy, one-eyed creature of indeterminate species and gender; and wreaking havoc on the hapless citizens of Nod's Limbs. But wreaking havoc can incur expenses, so the twins come up with a unique fund-raising scheme: They'll nab the pets of Nod's Limbs and transform them into exotic animals they can sell for big bucks. Not a bad plan, if one of the purloined pets wasn't a lethargic python with a raging appetite....

    Thirteen-year-old Zahrah Tsami feels like a normal girl -- she grows her own flora computer, has mirrors sewn onto her clothes, and stays clear of the Forbidden Greeny Jungle. But unlike other kids in the village of Kirki, Zahrah was born with the telling dadalocks. Only her best friend, Dari, isn't afraid of her, even when something unusual begins happening -- something that definitely makes Zahrah different. The two friends investigate, edging closer and closer to danger. When Dari's life is threatened. Zahrah must face her worst fears alone, including the very thing that makes her different.In this exciting debut novel by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, things aren't always what they seem -- monkeys tell fortunes, plants offer wisdom, and a teenage girl is the only one who stands a chance at saving her best friend's life.-from the Hardcover edition

    Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism. In the world of American poetry, Siken's voice is striking. In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big. . . . They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”

    Moliere's farcical, tragic, anarchic Don Juan (1665) is the inspiration for Patrick Marber's new play in which the action of the original is relocated to present day Soho, London.Whereas Moliere condemned his anti-hero to a literal Hell, Marber condemns him to a hell of his own making.Don Juan in Soho premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in December 2006.

    Found inside a disabled elevator, she is no longer able to function with her new consciousness of these memories—those which are so resistant to understanding. Confronted with this knowledge of evil, she must begin the painful process of remembering and reconstructing a new whole self.Helping Barbara to navigate her grief and her memories are her therapist, the Psalms, and most of all, the words of Paul Celan. Paul Celan: 1920-1970, Poet. An eastern European holocaust survivor who wrote haunting poems about the darker spiritual trials of life and relationships that exhibit a compact style that fuses broken words and chopped syntax to produce a stark musicality.This is a novel about a woman who goes to hell and back. It’s a story which affirms the resilience of the human spirit and the healing power of love and faith.

    The stories told to her by her grandmother and godmother, including the horrific voyage aboard the infamous slave ship Rosalie, have become part of her own story, the one she tells in this haunting novel by the acclaimed Haitian writer Évelyne Trouillot.Inspired by the colonial tale of an African midwife who kept a cord of some seventy knots, each one marking a child she had killed at birth, the novel transports us back to Saint-Domingue, before it became Haiti. The year is 1750, and a rash of poisonings is sowing fear among the plantation masters, already unsettled by the unrest caused by Makandal, the legendary Maroon leader. Through this tumultuous time, Lisette struggles to maintain her dignity and to imagine a future for her unborn child. In telling Lisette's story, Trouillot gives the revolution that will soon rock the island a human face and at long last sheds light on the invisible women and men of Haitian history.