Note to Self


Connor Franta - 2017
    Exploring his past with humor and astounding insight, Connor reminded his fans of why they first fell in love with him on YouTube—and revealed to newcomers how he relates to his millions of dedicated followers.Now, two years later, Connor is ready to bring to light a side of himself he’s rarely shown on or off camera. In this diary-like look at his life since A Work In Progress, Connor talks about his battles with clinical depression, social anxiety, self-love, and acceptance; his desire to maintain an authentic self in a world that values shares and likes over true connections; his struggles with love and loss; and his renewed efforts to be in the moment—with others and himself.Told through short essays, letters to his past and future selves, poetry, and original photography, Note to Self is a raw, in-the-moment look at the fascinating interior life of a young creator turning inward in order to move forward.

A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story


Anthony Godby Johnson - 1993
    Johnson's story of AIDS, abuse, and hope received extensive media coverage. Foreword by Paul Monette; Afterword by Fred Rogers, with a new Afterword by the author.

Nothing Is Okay


Rachel Wiley - 2018
    As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley's work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.

Envelope Poems


Emily Dickinson - 2016
    Instead, she created at home small handmade books. When, in her later years, she stopped producing these, she was still writing a great deal, and at her death she left behind many poems, drafts, and letters. It is among the makeshift and fragile manuscripts of Dickinson’s later writings that we find the envelope poems gathered here. These manuscripts on envelopes (recycled by the poet with marked New England thrift) were written with the full powers of her late, most radical period. Intensely alive, these envelope poems are charged with a special poignancy—addressed to no one and everyone at once.Full-color facsimiles are accompanied by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin’s pioneering transcriptions of Dickinson’s handwriting. Their transcriptions allow us to read the texts, while the facsimiles let us see exactly what Dickinson wrote (the variant words, crossings-out, dashes, directional fields, spaces, columns, and overlapping planes).

The Girl and the Goddess: Stories and Poems of Divine Wisdom


Nikita Gill - 2020
    A girl with a strong will, a full heart, and much to learn. Born into a family reeling from the ruptures of Partition in India, we follow her as she crosses the precarious lines between childhood, teenage discovery, and realizing her adult self. In the process, Paro must confront fear, desire and the darkest parts of herself in the search for meaning and, ultimately, empowerment.Nikita Gill's vivid poetry and beautiful illustrations have captured hearts and imaginations--but in The Girl and the Goddess, she offers us her most personal and deeply felt writing to date: an intimate coming-of-age story told in linked poems that offers a look into the Hindu mythology and rich cultural influences that helped her become the woman she is today.

Odes to Lithium


Shira Erlichman - 2019
    With inventiveness, compassion, and humor, she thrusts us into a world of unconventional praise. From an unexpected encounter with her grandmother's ghost, to a bubble bath with Bjӧrk, to her plumber's confession that he, too, has Bipolar, Erlichman buoyantly topples stigma against the mentally ill. These are necessary odes to self-acceptance, resilience, and the jagged path toward healing. With startling language, and accompanied by her bold drawings and collages, she gives us a sparkling, original view into what makes us human.

Metaphysical Dog


Frank Bidart - 2013
    Decipher     love. To make what was once whole     whole again: or to see     why it never should have been thought whole.     This “ancient work” reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the “hunger for the Absolute”—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled “History is a series of failed revelations.”     The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books of 2013A New York Times Notable Book of 2013An NPR Best Book of 2013

Bread and Wine


Samuel R. Delany - 1999
    Award-winning science fiction author Samuel Delany and Dennis, a homeless New Yorker selling books from a blanket, discover sexual joy and explode stereotypes while exploring the possibilities for compassion and acceptance in this moving graphic novel -- all the more touching because it's true.

Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction


Lee MandeloSarah Kanning - 2012
    Speculative fiction is the literature of questions, of challenges and imagination, and what better to question than the ways in which gender and sexuality have been rigidly defined, partitioned off, put in little boxes? These seventeen stories explore the ways in which identity can go beyond binary from space colonies to small college towns, from angels to androids, and from a magical past to other worlds entirely, the authors in this collection have brought to life wonderful tales starring people who proudly define (and redefine) their own genders, sexualities, identities, and so much else in between.

Spiral Bound


Dessa - 2008
    File Under:Life,Death,Vertigo.Sparrows,Saints,and Morphine.

For The Healing


Shenaia Lucas - 2017
    Each chapter serves a different purpose. The chapters are For The Healing, For The Erasing, For the Loving, For the Oppressed, and For the Broken. This book teaches you to love yourself and others. It's better experienced than described, so sit down with some coffee and allow yourself to feel-- and heal.

Like a Beggar


Ellen Bass - 2014
    Those who turn to poetry to become confidants for another's stories and secrets will not be disappointed.”—Publishers Weekly“In her fifth book of poetry, Bass addresses everything from Saturn’s rings and Newton’s law of gravitation to wasps and Pablo Neruda. Her words are nostalgic, vivid, and visceral. Bass arrives at the truth of human carnality rooted in the extraordinary need and promise of the individual. Bass shows us that we are as radiant as we are ephemeral, that in transience glistens resilient history and the remarkable fluidity of connection. By the collection’s end—following her musings on suicide and generosity, desire and repetition—it becomes lucidly clear that Bass is not only a poet but also a philosopher and a storyteller.”—BooklistEllen Bass brings a deft touch as she continues her ongoing interrogations of crucial moral issues of our times, while simultaneously delighting in endearing human absurdities. From the start of Like a Beggar, Bass asks her readers to relax, even though "bad things are going to happen," because the "bad" gets mined for all manner of goodness.From "Another Story":After dinner, we're drinking scotch at the kitchen table.Janet and I just watched a NOVA specialand we're explaining to her motherthe age and size of the universe—the hundred billion stars in the hundred billion galaxies.Dotty lives at Dominican Oaks, making her way down the long hall.How about the sun? she asks, a little farmshit in the endlessness.I gather up a cantaloupe, a lime, a cherry,and start revolving this salad around the chicken carcass.This is the best scotch I ever tasted, Dotty says,even though we gave her the Maker's Markwhile we're drinking Glendronach...Ellen Bass's poetry includes  Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), The Human Line  (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), which was named a Notable Book by the San Francisco Chronicle, and Mules of Love (BOA, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award.  She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). Her work has frequently been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Sun  and many other journals. She is co-author of several non-fiction books, including The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1988, 2008) which has sold over a million copies and been translated into twelve languages. She is part of the core faculty of the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Be Gay, Do Comics


Matt BorsDelta Vasquez - 2020
    The life of a gay and Jewish Nazi-fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you'll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt pride. Brimming with resilience, inspiration, and humor, an incredible lineup of top indie cartoonists takes you from the American Revolution through Stonewall to today's fights for equality and representation.Featuring more than 30 cartoonists including Hazel Newlevant, Joey Alison Sayers, Maia Kobabe, Matt Lubchansky, Breena Nuñez, Sasha Velour, Shing Yin Khor, Levi Hastings, Mady G, Bianca Xunise, Kazimir Lee, and many, many more!

One More for the People


Martha Grover - 2011
    Playful, wry, and conversational, One More for the People chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As these idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she’s diagnosed with a rare and potentially fatal disease (whose 81 symptoms include dramatic changes to her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), One More for the People becomes something unexpected: a survival guide. In the spirit of Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Grover transforms her own misfortune into a tale as unsettling as it is entertaining.

Fiber


Rick Bass - 1998
    It is a story about last chances, about crafting solutions from the wreckage of a devastated place, and about the high cost, emotionally and physically, of hope in the presence of despair. Writing from the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, the wildest valley in the Lower 48, Rick Bass portrays the plight of the artist deeply embedded in a place he loves. The author asks how a writer survives amidst the destruction of the natural world around him, if, like Bass, the writer must struggle passionately to protect a place like the Yaak from devastation. As a work of fiction, "Fiber" elegantly follows the life of the narrator as he evolves from the geologist who takes, to the artist who gives, to the activist who fights, and finally to the troubling and magical 'log fairy.'