. . what's not to love about a military man? Meet these seven irresistible heroes who fight just as passionately for true love as they do for their country. Healing Beau: USA Today best-selling author Alicia Hunter Pace spins a poignant small-town story of healing and homecoming. After recklessly destroying his military career, Ranger Sergeant Beau Beauford retreats home to Beauford Bend . . . only to promptly impregnate his best and oldest friend. Christian Hambrick is made of guts, steel, and plain good sense, except for that lifelong torch she's held for Beau. When old secrets resurface, she'll wage full-scale war on Beau's past to preserve their future.Her Soldier's Touch by J.M. Stewart: When U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Colten Taylor returns briefly to Phoenix to bury his brother, he's shocked to see Rachel Madison waiting for him at the airport. He regrets the morning he walked away from her; coming from an abusive home taught Colt to put limits on all his relationships. But now that she has his son in tow, will he keep running?California Homecoming by Casey Dawes: After returning from duty in the Middle East wounded in both body and spirit, Hunter Evans volunteers to help Sarah Ladina fix up a run-down Victorian in the beach town of Costanoa. Can they get beyond their painful past and complicated present to find the love and respect they need?Island Pursuits by Heather Rodney-Diaz: Former U.S. Marine Adrian Mendez returns to his homeland of Trinidad and Tobago only to run into a feisty island goddess with one flaw - she has no love of anything military.Angel Without Wings by Mari Manning: After resigning from a promising army career to help his mother and wounded brother, Jesse McCormick struggles to save the family farm. Only one plan will earn him enough money to get his family out of debt - a dangerous assignment with a paramilitary group. But he's slowly losing his heart to Linnea Reyes, a war widow helping to save the farm. Can he give up her love just when he's found it?The Cormorant Club by Anji Nolan: When they're reunited by chance, Holly and Scott's attraction is as undeniable as when they met in a MASH unit in Vietnam. But when a murder-for-hire group starts targeting their war contacts, will they lose their second chance at love?Enlisted by Love by Jenny Jacobs: Ex-army officer Matthew Blake is eager to start a new career, until he comes up against the most challenging obstacle he's ever encountered: Greta Ferguson, the interior designer who challenges his every order.Sensuality Level: Sensual

    Swirling voices and skeins of story, laughter and rage, ferocious attention to detail and sweeping nuttiness, tears and chortling—these stories will remind readers of the late giant David Foster Wallace, in their straightforward accounts of anything-but-straightforward events; of modern short story pioneer Raymond Carver, a bit, in their blunt, unadorned dialogue; and of Julia Whitty, a bit, in their willingness to believe what is happening, even if it absolutely shouldn’t be. Funny, piercing, unique, memorable, this is a collection of stories readers will find nearly impossible to forget:... The barber who shaves the heads of the thugs in Bin Laden’s cave tells cheerful stories of life with the preening video-obsessed leader, who has a bald spot shaped just like Iceland.... A husband gathers all of his wife’s previous boyfriends for a long day on a winery-touring bus.... A teenage boy drives off into the sunset with his troubled sister’s small daughters…and the loser husband locked in the trunk of the car.... The late Joseph Kennedy pours out his heart to a golf-course bartender moments before the stroke that silenced him forever.… A man digging in his garden finds a brand-new baby boy, still alive, and has a chat with the teenage neighbor girl whose son it is.... A man born on a Greyhound bus eventually buys the entire Greyhound Bus Company and revolutionizes Western civilization.... A mountainous bishop dies and the counting of the various keys to his house turns… tense.... A man discovers his wife having an affair, takes up running to grapple with his emotions, and discovers everyone else on the road is a cuckold too.And many others.

    This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    This book is about the girls whose lives were ruined by me. I want to write about my story, for it’s the only way to be immortal. I want you to feel the pleasure of falling in love. The lust, the passion, the desire, and the craving that turns into an unhealthy addiction. And I want you also to feel the pain of losing someone, the ache, the agony, the bitterness, and the grief that cripples your soul forever. This is for everyone. The forgotten souls buried under the melancholy of the past. Yes, I will show you how much you hurt me, I will write. This is what my heart holds for you; half pleasure, half pain.

    The title, Regarding Wave,reflects "a half-buried series of word origins dating back through theIndo-European language: intersections of energy, woman, song and 'GoneBeyond Wisdom.'" Central to the work is a cycle of songs for Snyder'swife, Masa, and their first son, Kai. Probing even further than Snyder'sprevious collection of poems, The Back Country, this newvolume freshly explores "the most archaic values on earth… the fertilityof the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, theterrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance,the common work of the tribe…”

    Poets across the continents and centuries have described the feline family–from kittens to old toms, pussycats to panthers–doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves. Here are Yeats’s Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart’s Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, T. S. Eliot’s Rum Tum Tugger, William Blake’s tyger and Rilke’s panther. Here are tributes from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan, from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson, and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr. Seuss.The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace, and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

    Celebrated poet McHugh and renowned editor Lehman present the 20th edition of the popular and comprehensive Best American Poetry series.

    For anyone who's been let down by life and love, these poems reveal that the most important person one can fall in love with is oneself.

    "Clifton mythologizes herself: that is, she illuminated her surroundings and history from within in a way that casts light on much beyond."--The Women's Review of Books

    F. Said, Madeleine Thien, Salley Vickers, John Wood and Markus ZusakThis story, like so many stories, begins with a gift.The gift, like so many gifts, was a book...' So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that inspired this collection. In this cornucopia of an anthology, you will find essays by some of the world's most beloved novelists, nonfiction writers, essayists and poets. 'You will see books taking flight in flocks, migrating around the world, landing in people's hearts and changing them for a day or a year or a lifetime. 'You will see books sparking wonder or anger; throwing open windows into other languages, other cultures, other minds; causing people to fall in love or to fight for what is right. 'And more than anything, over and over again, you will see books and words being given, received and read - and in turn prompting further generosity.' Published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of global literacy non-profit, Room to Read, The Gifts of Reading forms inspiring, unforgettable, irresistible proof of the power and necessity of books and reading. Inspired by Robert Macfarlane Curated by Jennie Orchard

    Guest editor Rita Dove, a distinguished figure in the poetry world and the second African-American poet ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, brings all of her dynamism and well-honed acumen to bear on this project. Dove used a simple yet exacting method to make her selections: "The final criterion," she writes in her introduction, "was Emily Dickinson's famed description -- if I felt that the top of my head had been taken off, the poem was in." The result is a marvelous collection of consistently high-quality poems diverse in form, tone, style, stance, and subject matter. With comments from the poets themselves illuminating their poems and a foreword by series editor David Lehman, The Best American Poetry 2000 is this year's must-have book for all poetry lovers.

    Inhibitions melt away with these three deliciously erotic romance novellas that have something sweet in common: tempting chocolate.

    Compiled by her sister after the poet's death and originally published in 1956, this is the definitive edition of Millay, right up through her last poem, Mine the Harvest.

    Poetry is said to feed the soul, each poem a delicious morsel. When read aloud, the best poems provide a particular joy for the mouth. Poems about food make these satisfactions explicit and complete.Of course, pages can and have been filled about food's elemental pleasures. And we all know food is more than food: it's identity and culture. Our days are marked by meals; our seasons are marked by celebrations. We plant in spring; harvest in fall. We labor over hot stoves; we treat ourselves to special meals out. Food is nurture; it's comfort; it's reward. While some of the poems here are explicitly about the food itself: the blackberries, the butter, the barbecue--all are evocative of the experience of eating.Many of the poems are also about the everything else that accompanies food: the memories, the company, even the politics. Kevin Young, distinguished poet, editor of this year's Best American Poetry, uses the lens of food - and his impeccable taste - to bring us some of the best poems, classic and current, period.Poets include: Elizabeth Alexander, Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Seamus Heaney, Tony Hoagland, Langston Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Matthew Rohrer, Charles Simic, Tracy K. Smith, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Mark Strand, Kevin Young

    With engaging notes from the poets, Wagoner's superb introductory essay, series editor David Lehman's astute foreword about the current state of poetry and criticism, and cover art from the beloved poet John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry 2009 is a memorable and delightful addition to a series dedicated to showcasing the work of poets at their best.