That love that gives you butterflies. In Deja Simmons' case, her first love has turned into a nightmare. Have you ever loved someone wholeheartedly to the point that you were confused, blinded by love and painful abuse! Were the signs there? Did she ignore the signs? Deja thought when she laid eyes on Jace McCray he would be it for her. At eighteen, she met him and he was everything she imagined in a Prince Charming. For years, they were the perfect couple to those who knew them. Now at the age of 23, things had gotten worse, and Deja didn’t know what to do. They always say enough is enough. Can that be the case with Deja? Or will she die at the hands of the man she loves? Jace is your average dope boy trying to get the streets booming with the ring of his name. Being in the game he was destined to be the man. That was, until he had to sit down. With his world crumbling down, he uses and abuses any woman in his corner. Everything he’s going through, from losing friends to losing his credibility in the streets, has him going crazy. When you’re deep in a depression within yourself, your mind tells you to hurt the weakest around you. Will Jace continue to sink in his own depression? Or will he try to change his ways to be a better man to get back on top? No one said love was easy, but in matters of the heart we play the fool all too well. Before it's too late, can Jace be forgiven? Will Deja make it out of this dangerous love affair, after being soaked in her tears for many years. Follow Deja on this ride full of drama and emotions.

    Their parents expected them to have outstanding careers, a good man that leads the family, and lots of babies. However, life steps right on in and does its job by throwing curve balls that sends the sisters in many directions. Follow the Holiday sisters to see what lies ahead for them. Andrea Holiday is still living in Mississippi, working as a family attorney at law. She is very proud of the career she has always wanted, but she is very unhappy living a mundane life. At every turn, love is finding her sisters and friends, but seems to escape finding Andrea. While attending a conference in NYC, Andrea steps out of her comfort zone and gives a handsome thug the time of the day, and he gives her more than she bargains for. Will love finally find Andrea? To the outside eye, Anastasia Holiday is living the life. She has her own business, along with a great marriage. However, everything is not what it seems. Anastasia is tired of the façade and set out to do things her own way by finding solace in the arms and bed of another man. Will Anastasia find a way to combat the ill-feelings of her life and find a way to make her marriage work? Or will she succumb to finding love and a happy life with the thug she has fallen for? Alyssa Holiday has finally graduated college and was excited about finding a career in the communication field. However, she discovered those jobs are not what she thought they would be. So, Alyssa decided to change course and joined the FBI without informing her family of her new life choices. She has set a goal to become the best agent she can be. But when her first big case hits close to home, how will she balance the personal from the professional? Will she compromise her new career for family? Alexis Holiday moved to Georgia to attend Clark-Atlanta University. While there, she finds herself slipping into the fast life, so she ends up doing something that she had vowed to never to do. However, she must keep her family from finding out about her new gig. In the midst of this, she finds herself intrigued by two different people that she is very much attracted to, but she is confused about what to do. Will the chemistry Alexis experiences pull her towards the thuggish man that she craves, or in the opposite direction? Award-winning authors, Twyla T, Patrice Balark, Dani Littlepage, and J. Dominique, tagged teamed to bring the first book of their hot new, high octane urban fiction series, Thug Holiday. This story is filled with unlimited drama wrapped in luscious lies, undisclosed lust, secret rendezvous, and titillating secrets. Find out what happens when the sisters all meet up for the first time in years and enjoy the entire series!

    

    Because let’s face it! We hoomans are obviously stupid and trust me unicorns are never wrong. Did you know? The horn of the unicorn symbolizes ultimate truth and it has the power to pierce the chest of anyone who tries to lie. Damn!‘Uuuuuuuunicornnnnnnnnnnnnn,’ I yawned, waking up, after being thrown back to our crap-shit called Earth.‘So fellow hoomans, let’s begin.’About the book:This book is a sarcastic and humorous take on various themes like love, life, humanity, healing, and heartbreak - expressed through 51 beautiful chapters of relatable quotes, musings and poems. It basically deals with what we humans go through on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, every chapter is accompanied by a unique and perfectly orchestrated author's rant or opinion focused on one single person; You.

    This anthology breaks up the myth of hip-hop as a boys’ club, and asserts the truth that the cypher is a feminine form.

     Learning is the one perfect religion, its path correct, narrow, certain, straight. —from "Allegiance" Over twenty years, Elizabeth Alexander has become one of America's most exciting and important poets, and her selection as the inaugural poet by President Obama confirmed her place as one of the indispensable voices of our time. Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 gathers twenty pages of new poetry, along with generous selections from her previous work. The result is the definitive volume to date by this American master.

    As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. . . . For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable—Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. These are the young kings whom we love to kill—over and over again."From "Some Young Kings":The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. Little boy blue come blowyour horn. The cow's in the meadow. And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls—Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker. Charlie Parker . . .

    This is the poetry of a beautiful life.

    Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.

    Patient meditations on loss and the land where the people we love live and are also buried.

    The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself—confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain.

    Our companions are an aging poet, who is sad because he can no longer write—he has lost the joy he used to have in simply being alive–and a young, mischievous female donkey, who is sad because she can't run and play—she has a touch of arthritis. . . . There is a moral, of course, but any moral looks dull next to the simple happiness of the old poet and his long-eared muse."—The New Yorker

    Her little sister, Angela, was brutally murdered and Savage has been searching for the strength to write her grief down ever since. Finally, just shy of six years later, and one year after justice finally rained down upon the man to blame, Savage found the courage to try. This collection is an 18-poem narrative of the very real and raw emotions felt by the author over the years since the tragedy. Here, she pays homage to her baby sister and bleeds her own pain onto paper for anyone who might need help finding their own strength.

    During this period Harrison wrote Legends of the Fall--a collection of novellas--and two novels: Farmer and Warlock. He evolved a new approach to his poetry, hoping to avoid both academic formalism and the vogue of hygienic confessions. The voice of the selected poems speaks with the courage, intelligence, and wit that is Harrison's alone."Jim Harrison grew up in northern Michigan and shares with that other Michigan poet, Theodore Roethke, not only the longing to be part of the instinctual world, but also the remarkable knowledge of plant and animal life that comes only with long familiarity and close observation. This raises an incidental question: How many more poets of this kind will we see in the United States? It is a melancholy thought that Mr. Harrison may be the last of the species."--Poetry

    Here is a literary love song that will entrance anyone who has lived in—or spent time—in the greatest of American cities. A masterful evocation of the city that never sleeps, The Colossus of New York captures the city’s inner and outer landscapes in a series of vignettes, meditations, and personal memories. Colson Whitehead conveys with almost uncanny immediacy the feelings and thoughts of longtime residents and of newcomers who dream of making it their home; of those who have conquered its challenges; and of those who struggle against its cruelties. Whitehead’s style is as multilayered and multifarious as New York itself: Switching from third person, to first person, to second person, he weaves individual voices into a jazzy musical composition that perfectly reflects the way we experience the city. There is a funny, knowing riff on what it feels like to arrive in New York for the first time; a lyrical meditation on how the city is transformed by an unexpected rain shower; and a wry look at the ferocious battle that is commuting. The plaintive notes of the lonely and dispossessed resound in one passage, while another captures those magical moments when the city seems to be talking directly to you, inviting you to become one with its rhythms. The Colossus of New York is a remarkable portrait of life in the big city. Ambitious in scope, gemlike in its details, it is at once an unparalleled tribute to New York and the ideal introduction to one of the most exciting writers working today.From the Hardcover edition.