But this utterly original meditation on art and war might transform the way you see the world—and that makes all the difference."How to live in the face of so much suffering? What difference can one person make in this beautiful, imperfect, and imperiled world?"Through a dazzling combination of memoir, history, reporting, visual culture, literature, and theology, Sarah Sentilles offers an impassioned defense of life lived by peace and principle. It is a literary collage with an urgent hope at its core: that art might offer tools for remaking the world.In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles tells the true stories of Howard, a conscientious objector during World War II, and Miles, a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, and in the process she challenges conventional thinking about how war is waged, witnessed, and resisted. The pacifist and the soldier both create art in response to war: Howard builds a violin; Miles paints portraits of detainees. With echoes of Susan Sontag and Maggie Nelson, Sentilles investigates images of violence from the era of slavery to the drone age. In doing so, she wrestles with some of our most profound questions: What does it take to inspire compassion? What impact can one person have? How should we respond to violence when it feels like it can't be stopped?Praise for Draw Your Weapons"A collage of death, savagery, torture, and trauma across generations and continents, Sarah Sentilles's Draw Your Weapons is painful to read, hard to put down, and impossible to forget."—O: The Oprah Magazine"In her dynamic, impressionistic (and cleverly titled) book, Sentilles focuses on language and images-particularly photography-and considers what role they play in peace and war. Eschewing a traditional narrative, Sentilles focuses on two men-one a World War II conscience objector who makes violins, and the other an Abu Ghraib prison guard who paints detainee portraits. In brief, delicately layered pieces rather than a narrative, Sentilles has created a collage that explores art, violence, and what it means to live a principled life."—The National Book Review"It's the kind of book that, after reading just half, you have to stop and catch your breath, because reading it changes you, not just in terms of what you know-it changes the way you think and how you feel-so much so that, halfway in, I wanted to go back and start again because I felt I was already a different person to the person I was when I began."—Turnaround

    Haunted by the crimes in which he'd participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--& obtain absolution from--a Jew. Faced with the choice between compassion & justice, silence & truth, Wiesenthal said nothing. But even years after the war had ended, he wondered: Had he done the right thing? What would you have done in his place?In this important book, 53 distinguished men & women respond to Wiesenthal's questions. They are theologians, political leaders, writers, jurists, psychiatrists, human rights activists, Holocaust survivors & victims of attempted genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, China & Tibet. Their responses, as varied as their experiences of the world, remind us that Wiesenthal's questions are not limited to events of the past. Often surprising, always thought provoking, The Sunflower will challenge you to define your beliefs about justice, compassion & responsibility.

    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.

    Remainder is about the secret world each of us harbors within, and what might happen if we were granted the power to make it real.

    World-famous Christian leader and bestselling author, Riley Ellison invites the press to join him in exactly two weeks, at which time he will tell Mead Mountain to move on live television, and in accordance with the promises revealed in Scripture, he claims it will move. The lines are drawn and everyone must choose a side. If the mountain moves at Ellison’s command, no one could reasonably continue to doubt God’s existence, and America will enter into the next Great Awakening. If it does not move, pews will be emptied, believers will be shamed into silence, and the faithful will be made a laughingstock worldwide. In the meantime, Ellison continues to do what he always does: attempt to shine Christ's joy into a dark and broken world. He encounters a gun-toting drunk, a God-hating celebrity, and a desperate woman trying to save the life of her son. Will Ellison's relentless pursuit to emulate Jesus act as a transforming force in the lives around him, or will the horrendous pain of this world cause Riley's spark to finally burn out? And will any of it be enough to overcome the biases of the reporter assigned to his story? It will take a miracle. "...One of the most uplifting and beautiful books I've ever read. This book is filled with the name of Jesus Christ and totally shows God's glory..." "...Best Christian fiction I have read! The book is riveting, thought provoking, and relevant to today..." "...I like Christian fiction, but it often follows a formula. This book breaks that mold, and will change your heart if you let it..." "...It was a story I will want to read again and there will be underlined parts in red..." "...This book took my breath away and made my heart swell. So many beautiful examples of what would happen if we lived out Christ-like love..." "...A real encouragement to me as a Christian, we must not lose hope in a world that seems to be falling apart. Our Heavenly Father sees all and is in complete control of our circumstances. Wow, the call to love is so real and we are able to love thru Christ!..." "...I doubt my little review will mean much, but if you are in a place where you feel God does not hear your prayers, read it..." "...I'll be thinking about this one for a long time..." "...Whatever you think is going to happen to that mountain, you'll be surprised...".

    "Dark, demented humor, as horrifying as it is hilarious."--Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press

    Old Europe still lives in Bosselaar's rich language: Entre chien et loup, as it's known in Flanders--the time at dusk when a wolf can be mistaken for a dog.Lyrical poetry that sings of farmers, families and nunneries in Belgium and Flanders.

    Her mother, Meg, ex–rock star and professional question evader, shares only the end of the story—the post-fame calm that Phoebe’s always known. Her sister, Luna, indie-rock darling of Brooklyn, preaches a stormy truth of her own making, selectively ignoring the facts she doesn’t like. And her father, Kieran, the cofounder of Meg’s beloved band, hasn’t said anything at all since he stopped calling three years ago.But Phoebe, a budding poet in search of an identity to call her own, is tired of half-truths and vague explanations. When she visits Luna in New York, she’s determined to find out how she fits in to this family of storytellers, and to maybe even continue her own tale—the one with the musician boy she’s been secretly writing for months. Told in alternating chapters, Phoebe’s first adventure flows as the story of Meg and Kieran’s romance ebbs, leaving behind only a time-worn, precious pearl of truth about her family’s past—and leaving Phoebe to take a leap into her own unknown future.

    Medallion.Story summary: Something is odd about Grace. She has mismatched eyes, one dark and one light. She thinks she's seen God. When her mother dies, she begins to get letters from her, as if from the grave. The letters tell of her mother's life before she married Grace's father, in time, confessing fiercely guarded family secrets. "I wasn't always a Preacher's Wife... I made mistakes along the way."Looking back, as a middle-aged woman, Grace relives those transformative years, coming of age in the 1960s as the daughter of The Reverend Thad Carsten and his much-younger wife, Sharon. When they move to a new neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, Sharon is healthy and Grace takes turmoil in stride: a new school, her backward neighbors, the simmering Vietnam War and political unrest. On the whole, life is sublime-until Sharon gets sick and dies. Then Grace's world turns upside down.Days after Sharon is gone, the letters to her daughter start coming, delivered mysteriously in the dark of night. Grace finds them-addressed to her-and devours every word, desperate to figure out who's delivering them. As she struggles with questions of loss and faith, she begins to butt heads with the preacher, increasingly focused on the mysterious messenger and her mother's letters. The handwritten pages arrive periodically as Grace matures, fostering a strange mother daughter relationship.Early on, the letters offer motherly advice, but increasingly they shift their focus to Sharon's early teens, eventually confessing a forbidden young adult romance. By then, Grace is desperate for the rest of the story, searching everywhere for her mother's writings, until finally there's a breakthrough. When she reads the last of the letters-and an astonishing truth-she embarks on a journey that changes her life and perspective forever.What did Sharon confess in the last letter to her daughter? How does it affect their unusual mother daughter relationship? As Grace runs away to trace her mother's past and teenage romance, what will she find?With its elements of romance and mystery, The God of Sno Cone Blue, sometimes searched as "Snow" Cone Blue is best described as contemporary women's fiction, though its strong central male character also appeals to men. The novel's storyline and mother daughter relationship are fitting Inspirational Fiction, and its passion and coming of age tale are appropriate for teenagers and young adults.* USA Today Bestselling Author Linda Needham on this inspirational fiction story: "The God of Sno Cone Blue is a joyous celebration of a young girl's journey to womanhood. Grace is a modern match for Tom Sawyer, with a grand spirit and enough spunk to weather the heartache of losing her mother at a tender age. Along the way, she gains the wisdom to recognize the breadth of her mother's love through a series of posthumous, sometimes shocking letters delivered in the years that follow. With a driving style and a colorful cast of eccentric characters, author Marcia Coffey Turnquist fiercely delivers equal parts laughter, sorrow and the kind of joy that will stay with you long after you've finished the book."*Author Rod Gramer on this novel fraught with family secrets: "Marcia has created a compelling character in Grace, one whose great personal loss is redeemed by a great personal discovery."*Portland Society Page editor Elisa Klein on the story's mystery and romance: "Surprises abound and the twists and turns kept me flipping pages late into the night as I curled up in my favorite chair to drink it all in."*Award-winning artist D.K. Lubarsky on this coming of age novel: "A masterful storyteller, Turnquist takes you on a magical journey of discovery in this poignant tale of innocence and growing up. The God of Sno Cone Blue is a delightful read."

    

    frequently anthologized poem

    Clover fuses formal control, a solid grounding in poetic tradition (his allusions range from Shakespeare to Dickinson to John Cale), and sheer visionary exhilaration into a technical, moral, aesthetic, and imaginative lexicon that irradiates each page.The eerie cyberglow of Clover's lines illuminates a pageant of blurred and fragmented desolation: the Bomb, death camps, the Persian Gulf War, the beating of Rodney King, the whole numbing litany of modern horrors. Clover is a master of poetic shorthand, of the stark, unnerving image as immediate as yellow tape at a crime scene.Madonna anno domini is a sacrament for the twilight of the atomic age, a hellish Interzone with "God in abeyance" where dazed speakers search through the vertigo of negation for love and belief. And here. in this utterly convincing vision of a world whose center has long since lost its hold, we see the life on whose brink we, at the end of the millennium, find ourselves poised.

    Second Hand Smoke is the story of Mila's sons, Issac and Duncan, the one secretly abandoned in Poland, and the other, American-born, raised as an avenging Nazi hunter, poisoned with rage.Told in bursts of fractured realism and dark comedy, Second Hand Smoke is a postmodern mystery of great lyrical power, deep insight, and emotional resonance.

    Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests and then watched with increasing fear as gang life claimed friends and family members. Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation. Achieving success as an award-winning poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more—until his young son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in Always Running, a vivid memoir that explores the motivations of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants.At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-earned lesson for the next generation.

    Bergin.Illustrated with drawings by Aldo Salvadori