Explores twelve major themes, each one followed by prayer suggestions, guided meditations, ideas for reflection, and journal keeping.

    Everything is—so many glad hands competing for your attention, a scarf, a puff of soot, or just a blast of silence from a radio. What is it? That's for you to learn to your dismay when, at the end of a long queue in the cafeteria, tray in hand, they tell you the gate closed down after the Second World War. Syracuse was declared capital of a nation in malaise, but the directorate had other, hidden goals. To proclaim logic a casualty of truth was one. Everyone's solitude (and resulting promiscuity) perfumed the byways of villages we had thought civilized. I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward. Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories are just that. So I channel whatever into my contingency, a vein of mercury that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers, worn in the city again, promote open discussion.

    Important, so inspiring... Please read this book" -Sonny Moore, Recording Artist "There are very few ways to get inside the mind of a lyricist. One way is through reading their diaries, the other through sleeping with them. Eric's book is the more entertaining of the options. It's a raw look inside the heart and mind of a rock 'n' roll spiritualist whose struggles with love (Chaplin) and versus the world (Keaton) are laid out bare like an exhibitionist on a double-dare." -Mike Shea, Founder, AP Magazine "Coma Therapy" is the sound of a powerful new voice in contemporary American literature. Victorino's brand of punchy prose often draws comparisons to the likes of Charles Bukowski and Hunter S. Thompson. This debut collection of poems and short stories draws a dangerously thin line between the heartwarming and the horrifying... Eric Victorino then mischievously walks that line all the way to the last page. Defiant, triumphant, hopeful and wise.

    Encompassing the erotic and the melancholy, the mystical and the sardonic, this volume showcases a writer of dazzling intelligence and live-wire emotional immediacy.

    . . . Poetry busts guts." —Frank StanfordThe poetry publishing event of the season, this six-hundred-plus page book highlights the arc of Frank Stanford's all-too-brief and incandescently brilliant career.Despite critical praise and near-mythic status as a poet, Frank Stanford's oeuvre has never fully been unified. The mystery and legend surrounding his life—and his suicide before the age of thirty—has made it nearly impossible to fully and accurately celebrate his body of work. Until now.This welcome and necessary volume includes hundreds of previously unpublished poems, a short story, an interview, and is richly illustrated with draft poems, photographs, and odd ephemera.As Dean Young writes in the Foreword to the book: "Many of these poems seem as if they were written with a burnt stick. With blood in river mud... Frank Stanford, demonically prolific, approaches the poem not as an exercise of rhetoric or a puzzle of signifiers but as a man 'looking for his own tongue' in a knife-fight with a ghost."When It's After DarkI stealall the light bulbsand hide them like eggsin a basketgoing to some outlawI put on the best I can findI cover them with a swatchof somethingthat swells like a bitethat bleeds greencloth that smellsof a feed storebut looksto of been wornI go over to nasty willy's bridgeand throw them into the creekthere in the shade I listenfor themto make nests to escapeagony and burst

    Deliver us from distraction.Slow our heartbeat to a cricket's call.  --from “Prophecy” Pity the Beautiful is Dana Gioia's first new poetry book in over a decade. Its emotional revelations and careful construction are hard won, inventive, and resilient. These new poems show Gioia's craftsmanship at its finest, its most mature, as they make music, crack wise, remember the dead, and in a long, central poem even tell ghost stories.

    You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting

    He turned his eye to the world, to the cultures and the people around him, and saw reflections of himself. In this collection, he works in both free verse and traditional forms, rendering scenes of exquisite detail that pry into the hearts of his characters and reveal the contradictions that bind father to son, lover to lover, and person to person. From the broken hills and drowsy river valleys around Paducah, Kentucky, to Houston diners and Gulf Coast shrimp boats, to the tropical cityscape of Miami, Bolton creates vivid scenes in which his characters confront the loneliness and the "little music" of their lives. With a richly musical voice and an ear for the cadences of everyday speech, Bolton gives his readers not the trappings of love and grief, but the very things themselves, rendered in lines that reverberate with the authority of sincerity and truth.

    Haunted by their childhoods of material and emotional poverty, Jimmy and Rita float through days in urban San Francisco.

    These poems bear witness to survival in the face of brutality, while also elegizing two brothers haunted by shame, two lovers hounded by death, and an America wounded by war and numbered by religion. Brown summons myth, fable, and fairytale not to merely revise the Bible—more so to write the kind of lyric poetry we find at the source of redemption—for the profane and for the sacred.

    Martin Luther King called the "beloved community," a place where we see each other as the neighbors we already are. Healing the Divide urges us, at this fraught political time, to move past the negativity that often fills the airwaves, and to embrace the ordinary moments of kindness and connection that fill our days.

    the book is meant to be read straight through and takes you into the rabbit hole of falling in love.

    In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

    Living in the port city of Halifax, Goyette’s days are bounded by the substantial fact of the North Atlantic, both by its physical presence and by its metaphoric connotations. And like many of life’s overwhelming facts, our awareness of the ocean’s importance and impact waxes and wanes as the ocean sometimes lurks in the background, sometimes imposes itself upon us, yet always, steadily, is. This collection is not your standard “Oh, Ocean!” versifying. Goyette plunges in and swims well outside the buoys to craft a sort of alternate, apocryphal account of our relationship with the ocean. In these linked poems, Goyette’s offbeat cast of archetypes (fog merchants, lifeguards, poets, carpenters, mothers, daughters) pronounce absurd explanations to both common and uncommon occurrences in a tone that is part cautionary tale, part creation myth and part urban legend: how fog was responsible for marriages, and for in-laws; why running, suburbs and chairs were invented; what happens when you smoke the exhaust from a pride of children pretending to be lions. All the while, the anthropomorphized ocean nibbles hungrily at the shoreline of our understanding,refusing to explain its moods and winning every staring contest. “I wrote these poems,” comments Goyette, “because I know very little about the ocean and yet rely on it like a mirror, a compass.” In Ocean, Goyette demonstrates how a spirited, playful and richly mythopoetic engagement with the world can actually strengthen our grasp on its bigger truths.

    Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery.