The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

    Cheiro was a renowned palmist whose world travels gained attention in the press and whose palm readings for the rich and famous of his day, including Mark Twain, elicited words of praise. In this unique book are methods for reading personalities, recognizing astrological links, and prognostication, along with drawings of hands showing structural types and lines. A series of photographic hand prints taken directly from the famous people Cheiro read for, such as Sara Bernhardt, is also included.

    It is a story about owning the emotions that live inside the heart and the head. It is the cathartic experience of pain and loss but also the bittersweet feelings of joy and the complexity of beauty. Elisabet expresses the unraveling of herself and the complexity of emotions that stemmed from heartache, her own mental health and the struggles of growing up and into a world with no precedence for a first generation child. This is the accumulation of three years of tears and long nights figuring out that chaos isn't always a bad thing.

    Where Many Rivers Meet: Poems

    Three and a half years later, guided by a series of visions and dreams, James Twyman was mystically drawn to a barn deep in the Nevada wilderness where Heaven and Earth collide and magic changes lives.If you’ve ever wondered if we really can communicate with our loved ones who have passed to the other side, this book is your answer. If you’ve ever thought that Heaven and Earth never meet, then this story will reveal a world you never imagined . . . a world where love never ends and life goes on forever. Once you pick up this amazing book, you won’t want to put it down, and your life will never be the same.

    Cole's most recent poems have a daring sensitivity and imagistic beauty unlike anything on the American scene today. Whether they are exploring pleasure or pain, humor or sorrow, triumph or fear, they reach for an almost shocking intensity. Cole's fourth book, Middle Earth, awakened his audience to him as a poet now writing the poems of his career. Pierce the Skin brings together sixty-six poems from the past twenty-five years, including work from Cole's early, closely observed, virtuosic books, long out of print, as well as his important more recent books, The Visible Man (1998), Middle Earth (2003), and Blackbird and Wolf (2007). The result is a collection reconsecrating Cole's central themes: the desire for connection, the contingencies of selfhood and human love, the dissolution of the body, the sublime renewal found in nature, and the distance of language from experience. "I don't want words to sever me from reality," Cole says, striving in Pierce the Skin to break the barrier even between word and skin. Maureen N. McLane wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Cole is a poet of "self-overcoming, lusting, loathing and beautiful force." This book will have a permanent place with other essential poems of our moment.

    Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, the stories spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted. In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Peggy Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she reevaluates her family’s past, treating us to a meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process of healing. Her book, a moving memoir of childhood and family, testifies to the power of collective empathy in the transformations that make and remake us throughout our lives. We all live with injury and loss. This book transforms injury, transforms loss. Shumaker crafts language unlike anyone else, language at once poetic and profound. Her memoir enacts our human desire to understand the fragmented self. We see in practice the power of words to restore what medical science cannot: the fragile human psyche and its immense capacity for forgiveness.

    The only problem is, having a baby isn't as easy as she thought. Whether she's feng shui-ing the house to death with fertility symbols, throwing out her husband's tight boxers in favour of baggies, swapping wine and chocolate for green tea and yams, popping fertility drugs like M&M's, or having sex so precision-timed it makes international warfare manoeuvres look unorganized, her life is turned upside down. And when nothing seems to be working, her quest for the B-word turns into an obsession.Can Gina stay sane, get pregnant, and keep her marriage together? Or will her baby trail become a baby trap?

    A lot of suffering happens in this world, but when it involves a child, it touches everyone all the more and it is tolerated all the less. Empty Cradle is the writer’s personal recollection of the time leading up to and surrounding the abduction of her newborn infant, just days before Christmas. This story is based on a true crime - dates, times, and details were researched from media sources, court documents, and police records. A timeline of the mother and the kidnapper are shown separately, from childhood to adulthood, until the two paths crossed, resulting in a cataclysmic event that will leave the reader anxiously awaiting the final outcome.

    One we find our way into. And one that finds its way into us. Steeped in Scripture, Eugene Peterson's faith-filled reflections open the door.The Message Devotional Bible invites you on a journey--call it practicing resurrection, call it eating this book, or call it simply a long obedience in the same direction. From the pastor who translated the entire Bible, The Message Devotional Bible sets you on the right path--devoted not just to the Bible but to God, who, in Jesus, became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.Open the door between Scripture and your world.From Eugene . . .Over 600 scriptural insights52 contemplative readingsIntroductions to the books and genres of the BiblePlus . . .Large print for relaxed, enjoyable readingMore than 400 reflection questions9 neighborhood-themed articles

    Here the immediacy of Chuang Tzu's language is restored in a idiom that is both completely fresh and true to the original text. This unique collaboration between one of America's premier poet-translators and a leading Chinese scholar presents the so-called "Inner Chapters" of the text, along with important selections from other chapters thought to have been written by Chuang Tzu's disciples.

    Sin comes a new voice, Samantha King’s raw, relatable poetry both celebrates love and mourns the human “curse to feel.” Her verse transports readers to the most private reaches of love and longing. Born to Love, Cursed to Feel is about love—the good, the bad, and the confusing. It touches on morals and how when emotions are involved it’s not as black and white. The poetry is frequently written in a narrative manner that evocatively pulls you in and makes you feel. This book is about falling in love, bad decisions, and ultimately growth. The essence of it all is to show that no matter how far one falls all the mistakes don’t have to be what defines them.

    The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose shades are drawn. This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its vitality, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity, its plaintive truth-telling, and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture's more grotesque manipulations. We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through. We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.—from "Twenty Poems That Could Save America"Twenty Poems That Could Save America presents insightful essays on the craft of poetry and a bold conversation about the role of poetry in contemporary culture. Essays on the "vertigo" effects of new poetry give way to appraisals of Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Dean Young. At the heart of this book is an honesty and curiosity about the ways poetry can influence America at both the private and public levels. Tony Hoagland is already one of this country's most provocative poets, and this book confirms his role as a restless and perceptive literary and cultural critic.

    During the arduous sea voyage from the Netherlands to the ends of the earth, he encounters artist Bethari de Groot traveling to the colonies with her father, an executive with the Dutch East India Company.Hannes is a hothead, Bethari is headstrong, and their initial encounter is less than cordial. When they are shipwrecked off the coast of South Africa, Bethari discovers an admirable man inside the adventurer while he, in turn, is captivated by the young beauty’s courage and determination.While Bethari waits in Cape Town to begin her journey to Asia, she and Hannes discover their love for each other. When Hannes is dispatched to Ceylon on a mysterious mission, Bethari follows him and discovers that her beloved is entangled in a dangerous web of intrigue and skullduggery. Together they must fight for their future and their happiness.

    In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still/at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.