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Ballistics by Billy Collins


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84, Charing Cross Road


Helene Hanff - 1970
    Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that will grab your heart and not let go.

Of the Flame, Poems - Volume 15


Wendy E. Slater - 2016
    Slater is the second in the series of her spiritual poetry or “vision quest poetry” to be published. The poetry continues to chronicle the inner journey of self-discovery and the Divine, awakening us to our own Truth as we travel the path, the personal journey, and awaken from the illusory separation of self and Divinity. Subsequently, self-forgiveness allows us to surrender to our wholeness without false perfection. When we cast blame and self-judgment aside, we transform, heal, and reawaken from “the mythos” of separation and become One.

Floating in Darkness - A Journey of Evolution


Ron Garan - 2021
    An adventure that illuminates a path toward understanding the meaning of life and our place in the universe.-Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis that threatens all life on Earth. Desert Storm fighter pilot and NASA astronaut Ron Garan addresses this head-on in Floatingin Darkness: A Journey of Evolution, the follow-up to his critically acclaimed first book, The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles.-Ron takes us on an extraordinary journey through outer space and inner space. He explores the dancing, intersecting orbits of religion, spirituality, and science while grappling with his own role in the violence of combat and the effects of war on all aspects of human life. We witness Ron struggling with mortality while also basking in the sheer wonder and beauty of our world and beyond. From this perspective, Ron maps out a viable path forward—to solve our crisis, we need a giant leap in humanity’s evolutionary process. We must transcend individual and collective ego and embrace the true nature of our interdependence with this fragile planet and all life within its biosphere. -Ron shows us how to discover our purpose, detoxify our divisive culture, and become a “white blood cell” in a growing immune response to heal our world.-Floating in Darkness is a blueprint to build a restorative and positive future for all.

Return to the City of White Donkeys


James Tate - 2004
    Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times


Neil Astley - 2002
    Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory. Staying Alive is already an astonishing best-seller in the United Kingdom, where it has gained a wide-ranging audience. This new edition, specially revised for its American readership, reconnects acionados and newcomers alike to the force of poetry, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

A Painted House


John Grisham - 2001
    It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a "good crop."Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and he finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever. ©2000, 2001 Belfry Holdings, Inc. (P)2001 Random House, Inc. Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing, a Division of Random House, Inc.