For the Love of My Mother


J.P. Rodgers - 2005
    After giving birth to a son, John, Bridie's child was taken away from her, and she was sent to one of Ireland's infamous Magdalene Laundries. This was only the beginning... They took her freedom. They took her innocence. They took her child. But they couldn't take her spirit.

All the Hits So Far But Don't Expect Too Much: Poetry, Prose & Other Sundry Items [With 14-Track CD]


Bradley Hathaway - 2005
    The commentary will contain background on the poems or more deeply delve into themes or topics discussed in the poems themselves. The spiritual seeker as well as the mature in faith will both benefit from the poems.

Finding Her Cowboy


Sarah Gay - 2020
    Without the help of her mysterious benefactor cowboy, she would have never opened her doors. Will she ever find her cowboy?Jack Jones is moving to Dallas, but when he meets Becca, his back-door neighbor, he has a change of heart. She has a garden that needs tending and he needs her. Will he convince her that he’s the man she’s been searching for, or will she continue to push him away?

All My Mother's Secrets


Beezy Marsh - 2018
    What spare time she has is spent looking after her younger brother George and her two stepsisters, under the glowering eye of her stepfather Bill. In London between the wars, a girl like Annie has few choices in life – but a powerful secret will change her destiny.All Annie knows about her real father is that he died in the Great War, and as the years pass she is haunted by the pain of losing him. Her downtrodden mother won’t tell her more and Annie’s attempts to uncover the truth threaten to destroy her family. Distraught, she runs away to Covent Garden, but can she survive on her own and find the love which has eluded her so far?

An Encyclopaedia of Myself


Jonathan Meades - 2014
    Memory invents unbidden.’The 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, suicides. Death went dogging everywhere. Salisbury, where he was brought up, had two industries: God and the Cold War, both of which provided a cast of adults for the child to scrutinise – desiccated God-botherers on the one hand, gung-ho chemical warriors on the other. The title is grossly inaccurate. This book is, rather, a portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.

Sailing in a Spoonful of Water


Joe Coomer - 1997
    "Sailing in a Spoongful of Water" is his memior of your years spent aboard his vintage motorsailor, Yonder, off the coast of Maine. This is a book that will entrance lovers of the sea, yet more deeply is it's abook about family: In prose rich with humor and awe, Coomer revisits the signal moments in his life and finds in his wife and their parents and grandparents his own safest harbor. The work of a writer whose powers grow with each book," Sailing in a Spoonful of Water" is that uncommon thing--a book full of welcome and joy.

One Hundred Open Houses


Consuelo Saah Baehr - 2010
    Pert, pithy and very New York. Full of the admirable offhand observations of an unfooled eye." Jill Neville, The London Times Literary Supplement"(Daughters is) engrossing . . . the story Baehr tells touches so deeply one is tempted to reread every page." - Chicago Tribune (Best Friends is) a pleasure to read . . . fascinating, extraordinary women…I wished they were my best friends.” Susan Isaacs, author of Compromising Positions, Shining Through“Consuelo Saah Baehr is a very talented writer. She keeps you turning the pages, heart thumping, to see what will happen next.” Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything, Class ReunionProduct Description100 Open Houses is about real estate and life. It’s about the whispers from the soul hole that we barely hear. Rebecca Haas, like all of us, is being tortured to death by the sameness of her life, her thoughts, her weight, the incessant self review of life choices, her indecision, her stalled writing career. Can a change of space really change her life and finally give her the authenticity she needs? Take this trip with Rebecca through all of the open houses and the lives lived in them – is one of them yours?An excerpt from 100 Open HousesWhispers from the soul holeYou’re going along thinking everything is okay. You’re not noticeably dying or anything and even though your hair was thinning, suddenly for no reason, it stabilizes – even begins to get thicker – and you think, huh, some new kind of ‘fresh hell’ hormones must be kicking in but I’ll take it. Still every morning, in the quiet few minutes when you swing your legs out of bed and decide to get up, this voice whispers from the old brain hole or maybe it’s the soul hole and it says: Wait! If you were in an Ingmar Bergman movie and Death came and played chess with you, Death would win because you are not really living the best life you can.All through last fall and early winter I had that thought in my pocket. Maybe it accounted for a new addiction to read real estate news. Maybe I thought a change of residence would do the trick Real estate is the new drug and it’s better than crack because it only costs the price of the Sunday paper and not even that if you read it on line. But also, you can go into any Open House and see apartments and houses where you would never be invited. You can look in the medicine cabinet and in the closets and pretty much look at any damn thing you want. Then, you can say, “No thanks.”The New York Times just put out an entire magazine devoted to real estate. It’s called Key and on the cover is a stylized picture of a key with red lines radiating from it that look like the vein and capillary system inside your body. Maybe that’s the subliminal message they are trying to send: that Real Estate is the substance of your life.When I read Key magazine, I feel as if all the information has segregated me and shut me out. One of the articles tells you how much house one and a half million dollars can buy today. If you want to move to Szigetkoz, Hungary (no, I didn’t misspell it) you get a 30-acre, ten-bedroom castle. In New York City, you get a one-bedroom apartment with lava-stone kitchen countertops and the noise of the West Side Highway at your doorstep.That’s what I was going to have to do to save my life – move from my coveted idyllic village and find myself some Real Estate in New York City. I didn’t have a million dollars. I was going to have to really HUNT for a match like the innocent people in the New York Times they profile in The Hunt.

A Nurse and Mother


Evelyn Prentis - 2012
    It was the smile that one woman gives to another and not the chilly facial movement from Matrons of old. "Do you think you would be able to work 9 to 3.30?" For a moment I couldn't think at all. There seemed something not quite right in being paid for so little labour.' At the end of the Second World War, as husbands came back to Civvy Street their wives had the luxury of staying at home with the children. For a short while at least. Soon Evelyn realised she had to find part-time work to make ends meet, and to her astonishment she was offered part-time hours at her old hospital.The day-to-day job hadn't changed much, but she was now a nurse and mother. Whooping cough and measles could still kill a small child, and the early '50s polio epidemic left the whole country in shock.But the nurses worked hard, moaned incessantly about their aching feet and yet found things to laugh at, just as they did from the start of their training. If old soldiers never die, then neither do nurses.

The Truth Is We Are Perfect


Janaka Stucky - 2015
    He is a forceful, cogent, incisive phrase-maker."—Bill Knott"The yearning in these poems is awash in dense, spiritual sexuality buffeted by time and the mishandling of promises and breakable bonds."—apt The Truth Is We Are Perfect contains fifty-four lyrics exploring the loss of oneself through the loss of an other, and how we seek to recreate ourselves in that absence. Stucky journeys into nothingness and, consequently, into awareness. His meditative sensibilities and minimalist style create ritualized poems acting as spells—transcribed to be read aloud and performed in the service of realizing that which we seek to become: "Because I love a burning thing / I made my heart a field of fire."Janaka Stucky is the publisher of Black Ocean as well as the annual poetry journal Handsome. He is the author of two chapbooks: Your Name Is The Only Freedom, and The World Will Deny It For You. His poems have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Fence and North American Review, and his articles have been published by the Huffington Post and the Poetry Foundation. He is a two-time National Haiku Champion and in 2010 he was voted "Boston's Best Poet" in the Boston Phoenix.

Payback Jack


Timothy Gene Sojka - 2021
    Why is Driskill determined to die on death row, and why have so many people pledged to stop him?

The Other Side of the Mountain - Part 2


E.G. Valens - 1978
    

The Widow and the Tree


Sonny Brewer - 2009
    Some say the fabled giant tree was once a knee-high seedling brushed by the black boot of Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. No other tree along the entire coastal crescent from New Orleans to Apalachicola can rival its majesty or its power to draw people to it. In silence and with dignity, the Ghosthead has served as sentinel to the widow's family land for countless generations. It was a childhood friend and a spirit guide in troubled times. Her father is buried in its shade. So why would the widow walk into a biker bar and hire a man to fire his chainsaw and inflict fatal gashes around its trunk, ending in a few minutes what took five centuries to create? The Widow and the Tree is a tale of dark deeds committed with mercy in mind, provoking the reader to ask: Would I have done the same thing? This book is based on a true story.

I'm Just Sitting on a Fence


Dax Flame - 2014
    But that may be misleading; there’s more to it than that.

Castaneda: The Wisdom of Don Juan


Carlos Castaneda - 2002
    Castaneda has come to be seen as an anthropologist of the soul, showing us that the inner world has its own inaccessible mountains, forbidding deserts and awesomely beautiful dangers which we are all called to confront. This audio program presents the first two and the best known titles in the Don Juan series, the Teachings of Don Juan and A Separate Reality. Listen -- and marvel -- as you are drawn into a breathtaking world of magical reality and ultimate truth from one of the most influential writers of our time.

Too Many Mothers


Roberta Taylor - 2005
    Nanny Mary was the wily matriarch, who would do almost anything to survive, including stealing from her seven children. Her nerve, humour and sheer determination were also the glue that held the family together. Roberta was born to a father Roberta’s mother adored, but that she herself would never know.In this memoir, Roberta Taylor travels to the emotional heart of her childhood to reveal the lives led by the men and women who influenced her most in her formative years. Too Many Mothers is a portrait of an embattled family at war with itself and the outside world. From petty crime to pet monkeys, tender romance to emotional blackmail, illegitimacy, adoption and even murder, Roberta Taylor has written a bittersweet and ultimately unforgettable memoir of her early life.