In his new book, Touch, written with an almost invisible but ever-present art, he continues to render his human topics—a mother’s death, a lover’s addiction, war—with a startling clarity. Cole’s new poems are impelled by a dark knowledge of the body—both its pleasures and its discontents—and they are written with an aesthetic asceticism in the service of truth. Alternating between innocence and violent self-condemnation, between the erotic and the elegiac, and between thought and emotion, these poems represent a kind of mid-life selving that chooses life. With his simultaneous impulses to privacy and to connection, Cole neutralizes pain with understatement, masterful cadences, precise descriptions of the external world, and a formal dexterity rarely found in contemporary American poetry.   Touch is a Publishers Weekly Best Poetry Books title for 2011.

    

    Leave your hang-ups and inhibitions at the door because this is a place where anything goes.This sizzling boxed set includes three delicious tales set in California during the summer of 1955:“Fog City Temptation” (San Francisco)A mysterious soldier explores his forbidden passions with an adventurous young man.“Hollywood Heartthrob” (Los Angeles)A mild-mannered fella gets swept up in a whirlwind secret love affair with the hottest hunk in Tinseltown.“Deep Release” (Sacramento)A bearish British doctor with magic fingers unlocks the desires of an insatiable high school graduate.Each pulse-pounding tale of gay romance is just the right length for an exciting bedtime story. Grab a towel and join us in the steam room...

    hotel room wondering how he would get through his scheduled interview with Hugh Jackman. For years he had interviewed the bright lights: Madonna, Courtney Love, Jessica Lange, and all the other usual suspects; but, Kevin knew that his rapidly unraveling life was as shallow as the hotel's hip furniture and he was hanging on by his fingertips. In I Left It on the Mountain, Sessums chronicles his early days in NY as an actor, his years working for Andy Warhol at Interview and Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, countless nights of anonymous sex, his HIV Positive diagnosis and his descent into addiction. It's also the chronicle of one man's spiritual redemption found while climbing to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostelo and trudging across the cold, lonely winter beaches of Provincetown. Peopled with the famous like Daniel Radcliffe and Diane Sawyer as well as anonymous companions corporeal and otherwise whom he met while mountain climbing and hiking, I Left It on the Mountain is the story of one man's fall and rebirth, the next moving chapter in Kevin Sessums' extraordinary life that takes him from the high to the low and back again. For readers who loved Mississippi Sissy and want to know what happened to that tenacious little boy with the baseball mitt, New York Times Best Seller I Left It On the Mountain is the sometimes very dark, but ultimately hopeful answer.

    Afterward, the doctor comes out with the results."I'm afraid I have some very bad news," the doctor says. "You're dying, and you don't have much time left.""Oh, that's terrible!" says the man. "Give it to me straight, Doc. How long have I got?""Ten," the doctor says sadly."Ten?" the man asks. "Ten what? Months? Weeks? What?!""Nine..."

    Provinces are in rebellion, while Emperor Nero struggles to maintain the remnants of his political power, as well as his last shreds of sanity. In the province of Hispania, the governor, Servius Sulpicius Galba, marches on Rome. In his despair, Nero commits suicide. Galba, the first Emperor of Rome from outside the Julio-Claudian Dynasty, is at first viewed as a liberator, yet he soon proves to be a merciless despot, alienating even those closest to him. A member of the imperial court, and former favorite of Nero, Marcus Salvius Otho seeks to become the childless Galba’s successor. When he is snubbed for another of the new emperor’s favorites, Otho decides to take the mantle of Caesar by force. At the same time, the governor of Germania, Aulus Vitellius, is proclaimed emperor by his legions, leading Rome into civil war. In the east, the empire’s fiercest general, Flavius Vespasian, has been embroiled in suppressing the rebellion in Judea over the last two years. With nearly one third of the entire Roman Army under his command, he wields formidable power. At first attempting to stay above the fray, and with the empire fracturing into various alliances, Rome’s most loyal soldier may soon be compelled to put an end to the Reign of the Tyrants.

    (Hence the “Dynasty” part of the show.)But even though they may have large homes, the Robertson brothers love hunting and fishing and proudly proclaim themselves “rednecks.”Phil was a star quarterback at Louisiana Tech but turned down the offer to play in NFL because he didn’t want to miss the duck season where he began his business and spent 25 years making duck calls from Louisiana cedar trees.The now multi-million dollar enterprise is managed by Phil’s third son Willie who is CEO of the company, while his brother Jase is the COO.Despite their wealth, they still wear camouflage prints, they hunt - shooting anything that flies or walks, they’re religious, and they’re full of subtle humor.The Robertsons are a traditional family who believe in guns and God.In the following pages you’ll get to know the family members in the Robertson family and learn why the show Duck Dynasty is watched by millions.As Willie Robertson said when asked by he believes the show is so popular – “We try to stick to our roots.We grew up not rich at all.We try to stay humble. We’ve been successful and God has blessed us. We always have a family prayer at the end of the show.”

    As chaplain to the Fire Department of New York, Father Mychal Judge was officially the first to go. A loving priest with a gift for the gab-gregarious yet humble, a healer with the ability to wipe away a widow's tears and put a smile on a fireman's face.And on September 11th Father Mike rushed to the fires at the World Trade Center as quickly as those who fought them, losing his own life while tirelessly ministering to New York's bravest.Father Mike recounts the colorful, astonishing and at times troubled life of a priest who saw the potential for good in everybody-in the homeless person he slipped a dollar to on the street; the alcoholic he sought to coax to an AA meeting; the early victims of AIDS he embraced and comforted; the troubled young men he visited in jail; and the thousands of firefighters he blessed as they rushed to their rigs answering the call. Here was a priest who rejoiced in the life around him and understood that even the most terrible times present us with wonders-that good always arises from the bad in the most unexpected ways. Or as Father Mike would say, "My God is a God of surprises."In this touching book, author Michael Daly retraces the footsteps of Father Mike as his vocation takes us inside the firehouse, inside his friary and his Church, and inside the chaos that often befalls New York.This is the tale of a larger than life priest who, in death, became a symbol of how much we truly lost that Tuesday in September. Father Mike is the inspirational story of a hero priest who blessed so many lives and will long be remembered by it.

    A Lonely Hearts ad in Time Out may not have promised much, but a detailed letter from an Australian called Drew marked the beginning of a relationship. April 1994 Drew was diagnosed with skin cancer. Three months later he died. This is their story.

    In his latest tome, he bares his chest about why C-Town's football faithful can't give up on their hometown favorites. (P.S. Not to rub it in, but over the last seven seasons, the Brownies record has been 38-74. Now that's true fan love.)

    Reily, a gay man living contentedly in South Carolina, never expects to find himself raising a child. But when his sister and her husband die in an accident, their will makes him guardian of their infant son.

    -- Alison Lurie

    Here, on a locked adolescent psychiatric ward, Keith meets the bewitching Laura. The two teens begin a passionate love affair--only to be separated and placed in different hospitals.By turns lyrical, funny, and poignant, and always informed by touching candor, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side is full of fascinating characters and unexpected twists-at once an odyssey into the extremes of the American 1970s, a universal tale of star-crossed teenage love, and an account of a deeply sensitive young person's struggle to find his place in the world. It marks the debut of a poised and compelling writer.Keith Fleming had been a pretty ordinary Midwestern kid--Little League, Boy Scouts--but the year he turns twelve, his family is torn apart by divorce when he learns that his mother and his Uncle Ed are both gay. By the time Keith is fifteen he has become disfigured by severe acne and is so wild that his father and stepmother place him in a draconian adolescent mental institution. Here he meets Laura, a pretty Mexican girl with whom he begins a passionate love affair.Keith's mother finally demands his release after a series of hospitalizations and sends him off to live with his uncle, Edmund White, in New York. Keith is soon transformed by his young uncle: He is sent to a dermatologist, to Barneys "Boy's Town" for new clothes, and to prep school. He receives a broad cultural education from Uncle Ed at home--all this despite Ed's being poor as well as completely caught up in the beehive of social and sexual activity of 1970s gay Manhattan. In the tradition of This Boy's Life and Girl, Interrupted, The Boy with a Thorn in His Side is a beautifully rendered saga of a deeply sensitive and alienated teen struggling to find his place in the world-and at the same time a very modern tale of teenage love and a young person's touching and complicated bond with an unlikely hero.

    I always responded, 'Why would I change? Being me is the easiest person to be.' I was lying. It wasn't. At the Beijing Olympic Games, he made history with an unforgettable dive, the first to ever score perfect tens from all four judges, and won gold for Australia. Grinning with pride from front pages around the world, there was no hint of the personal demons that had led this supremely talented young dynamo to quit diving less than two years before. Joyously out and proud, Matthew was a role model for his courage both in and out of the pool. Yet the crippling self-doubt and shadow of depression that had plagued him all his life forced him into premature retirement, at one point reduced to circus diving to earn money. Even after Beijing and being ranked No 1 in the world, those closest to Matthew could not guess that beneath that cheeky, fun-loving exterior he was painfully aware of how easily it could unravel. In the lead-up to the London Olympics, when injury threatened his hopes, he will have to find the strength again to balance his striving for perfectionism with the fear of his self-doubt taking hold again. Told with the honesty and courage he is admired for, Twists and Turns is an inspiring story of a true champion, in and out of the pool.

    This is no ordinary hairdresser. Viv Fraser Ph.D and stylist to the Edinburgh establishment, has a double life as an investigative journalist and finds herself involved in some hair-raising, not to mention explosive scenes, as she trawls the seamier side of her city. In this fast-paced mystery Viv investigates the case of a missing teenage boy, but her efforts are hampered by people trying to save their own skin. Always top of his class, Andrew’s school blazer turns up on a river path without him. As she picks at the veneer of the Capital’s gay scene Viv discovers an unsavoury mix of lies, jealousy and sexual deceit. Determined to find Andrew, she ignores threats on her life and continues to dig in places that even Detective Marconi has yet to explore.