Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.

    It is meant to be curled up with at night, accompanied by a cup of tea. It's a hug in book-form. It is there to comfort you when fuzzy socks and ice cream just aren't enough. It will inspire you to pick up a pen and write down thoughts of your own. It will help you to say the words that feel stuck in your chest. Take it on the train. Take it to the beach. Keep it on your nightstand. Keep it in your backpack. Read it at the park on benches beneath hundred-year-old trees. Read it while it's raining. Read it when you're happy. Read it when your heart aches. Eighteen Years is meant to be bent and worn, written in, tear-stained, and loved. This book is for you.

    her writing engages with subjects such as coming out as a trans woman, "surviving and thriving w/mental illness, and attempting to reconcile [her] anger/sadness at the state of things w/ [her] love for all the beauty that exists."

    This is where I come from. Everyone I love still lives there." Widely known for her performance poetry, author Brenna Twohy offers an intimate portrait of loss, abuse, and the messy ways that we heal. Often funny and always honest, Zig-Zag Girl is about grief, strength, and the magic of holding on.

    They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart. This beautifully written, heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place where we’ve suffered pain.‘Graceful, revealing, pitch perfect. Cole is an author who pays sharp attention to the world around her.’ Australian on 'Deeper Water'

    In this dark urban fantasy from author Victoria Schwab, a young woman and a young man must choose whether to become heroes or villains—and friends or enemies—with the future of their home at stake. The first of two books.Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives.

    Fate landed her at a wildlife sanctuary on the edge of the Amazon jungle where she was assigned to a beautiful and complex puma named Wayra. Wide-eyed, inexperienced, and comically terrified, Laura made the scrappy, make-do camp her home. And in Wayra, she made a friend for life.They weren’t alone, not with over a hundred quirky animals to care for, each lost and hurt in its own way: a pair of suicidal, bra-stealing monkeys, a frustrated parrot desperate to fly, and a pig with a wicked sense of humor. The humans, too, were cause for laughter and tears. There were animal whisperers, committed staff, wildly devoted volunteers, handsome heartbreakers, and a machete-wielding prom queen who carried Laura through. Most of all, there were the jungle—lyrical and alive—and Wayra, who would ultimately teach Laura so much about love, healing, and the person she was capable of becoming.Set against a turbulent and poignant backdrop of deforestation, the illegal pet trade, and forest fires, The Puma Years explores what happens when two desperate creatures in need of rescue find one another.

    She spends her days tucked away in her forge, safe from society and the anxiety it causes her, using her magical gift to craft unique weapons imbued with power.Then Ziva receives a commission from a powerful warlord, and the result is a sword capable of stealing its victims' secrets. A sword that can cut far deeper than the length of its blade. A sword with the strength to topple kingdoms. When Ziva learns of the warlord’s intentions to use the weapon to enslave all the world under her rule, she takes her sister and flees.Joined by a distractingly handsome mercenary and a young scholar with extensive knowledge of the world's known magics, Ziva and her sister set out on a quest to keep the sword safe until they can find a worthy wielder or a way to destroy it entirely.A teenage blacksmith with social anxiety accepts a commission from the wrong person and is forced to go on the run to protect the world from the most powerful magical sword she's ever made.

    Presenting itself as an investigation into the suicide of a close friend—perhaps real, perhaps fictional—more than twenty years earlier, Levé gives us, little by little, a striking portrait of a man, with all his talents and flaws, who chose to reject his life, and all the people who loved him, in favor of oblivion. Gradually, through Levé’s casually obsessive, pointillist, beautiful ruminations, we come to know a stoic, sensible, thoughtful man who bears more than a slight psychological resemblance to Levé himself. But Suicide is more than just a compendium of memories of an old friend; it is a near-exhaustive catalog of the ramifications and effects of the act of suicide, and a unique and melancholy farewell to life.

    Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously, you won't know whether to laugh or cry, but you'll definitely keep reading.

    In these poems you will find sex and survival turned inside out, offering fresh perspective on what it means to be counted among the wounded. Where we expect to find liability, we find muscle. Where we expect to find numbness, we find thirst. Bring Down the Chandeliers is an exploration of trauma, body and faith. It is also an inquiry into forgiveness. As such these poems are not just for sexual assault survivors; they are for anyone who has struggled to forgive oneself and/or one's trespassers. They are for anyone making a life in the midst of aftermath. Tara Hardy is, as Dorothy Allison claims, "The real deal. Passionate, brave, gifted, insightful, dead-on in language and craft.� Find yourself strangely hopeful amid her explorations of addiction and justice. Consider your own compass as she navigates body, as she confronts sex as the site of what was both stolen and returned. Find a surprising bit of yourself in a story may not be yours, but in which you're invited to grapple with your own vulnerabilities and strengths. Walk away with a more intricate understanding of your own humanity.

    Chronicling the relationship between a lonely artist and her absent--albeit abusive--muse, Magic with Skin On will gently break you, then put you back together again.

    Published 20 years ago, this sequence of poems charts the progress of a love affair from the passionate honeymoon with the milk bottles turning to cheese on the doorstep, through the stage of quarrels, jealousy, recriminations and boredom, to the point where love is as nice as a cup of tea in bed.

    Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt's most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt's writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt's influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau's Walden.With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.

    He takes a passenger: a young trainee cleric and amateur geologist named Charles Darwin. This is the story of a deep friendship between two men, and the twin obsessions that tore it apart, leading one to triumph and the other to disaster...