Each essay gives an unfiltered look at the ups and downs of family life and a remarkable window into the challenges of modern motherhood. Topics range from babysitter woes to family visits to coping with a child's burgeoning independence. These collected writings represent nine years' worth of stories about the greatest adventure of Maynard's life, or, as she writes, "the difficult, exhausting, humbling, and endlessly gratifying business of raising children, of ensuring the health of both body and soul." This ebook features an illustrated biography of Joyce Maynard including rare photos from the author's personal collection.

    Best of all, he's packed us in his suitcase. He represents an ever-changing population of those raised elsewhere who find themselves beckoned by the history, mystique, and magic-makers of New York City. These poems inhabit their own contradictions, and exquisitely navigate the many complicated sides of what it means to be alive. About The Author: Jon Sands has been a professional teaching and performing artist since 2007. He's a recipient of the 2009 NYC-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam. He is the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. His work has appeared in decomP magazine, The Millions, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Danse Macabre, The November 3rd Club, and others. He lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.

    Published posthumously, this volume rounds out the life of the legendary guitarist and composer, providing more backstory behind his creative ferocity. The stories provide a personal view into decades of his poignant insights into life and music.

    “A marvelous prosody, a perfect ear for the beautiful potentials of common speech, something he learned from folk song, but mostly he learned from just listening” (Kenneth Rexroth).

    I needed a Viking. I needed someone who wasn't afraid of my strengths or of my needs. I chose wrong in the past...Beloved contemporary poet Alfa is back with a brand-new collection of more than 180 heartfelt poems on the theme of woman warriors and the masculine heroes they long for. In gorgeous, compelling, and intimate prose, I Needed a Viking takes us on an emotional journey of a woman searching for strength in the midst of a storm.

    Rudy's poems and quotes have been viewed and shared millions of times as he has traveled the country and the world performing for sell-out crowds. Helium is filled with work that is simultaneously personal and political, blending love poems, self-reflection, and biting cultural critique on class, race and gender into an unforgettable whole. Ultimately, Rudy's work rises above the chaos to offer a fresh and positive perspective of shared humanity and beauty.

    We Were Young explores the heartbreaks, hangovers, and hang ups associated with growing up.

    Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie's, a swank nightspot serving highballs and French-fried shrimp to a generation of optimistic and prosperous Americans. In the inevitable dimming of the neon sign outside the restaurant, we see both the passing of an old world way of life and the end to the postwar exuberance that was Eddie Wenzek's "last fine time."

    From the narratives of army life during World War Two to the domestic and familial scenes of his final book, this selection presents Jarrell's art at its best, comparable in power and variety to that of his contemporaries Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.

    K. Williams, was awarded the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, Edward Hirsch noted that the book's compression and exactitude gave it "the feeling of a contemporary sonnet sequence." Hirsch added: "Like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's Notebooks, Mr. Williams's short poems are shapely yet open-minded and self-generative, loosely improvisational though with an underlying formal necesity."

    Nora Johnson's The World of Henry Orient, published in 1958, is an amusing, affectionate satire of the last days of innocence in the lives of two New York girls, Marian "Gil" Gilbert and Valerie "Val" Boyd. The boredom and impatience of adolescence are richly caught, even as they inspire crazy escapades that will eventually open up the world for these two bright but naive girls.Val and Gil have become friends at an age when friendship is the most important thing. Boys have not entered the picture yet, but childhood has begun to recede and the world is beckoning them. The girls are growing up in comfortable upper-middle-class homes in Manhattan, which creates a special kind of tension and stress in their lives. They are just old enough to have some independence, to play at being grownups, with the city as their playground. At a Carnegie Hall concert, they see a pianist named Henry Orient, and they are immediately smitten with him -- not in the sexual sense, but moonstruck nonetheless. Henry Orient becomes the focus of their lives. They follow him around Manhattan, observing his routine, his "world," unaware at first that they are observing the pianist bound up in a snarl of romantic liaisons. What happens to Val and Gil is what we now called "bonding," the kind of friendship that smoothes the transition from innocence to worldliness, from the certainties of childhood to the infinite possibilities of adulthood.Engaging and exuberant, The World of Henry Orient treats its heroines with affection and good humor. These are silly girls, it seems, doing little more than playing games, but a great deal goes on beneath the surface of their lives. Nora Johnson is sensitive to the delicate stresses that threaten the security adolescents have always known.

    This book contains the poem “Grace”, which the Poetry Society of America chose for their Poetry in Motion series to entertain public transit passengers in major metropolitan areas.

    The volume responds primarily to the twenty-first century's inescapable evidence of the terms of black life--not so much new as newly visible. The poems trace a whole web of connections between the kinds of violence that affect people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that do and do not divide us. How do we protect our humanity, our ability to feel deeply and think freely, in the face of a seemingly endless onslaught of physical, social, and environmental abuses? Where do we find language to describe, process, and check the attacks and injuries we see and suffer? What actions can break us out of the soul-numbing cycle of emotions, moving through outrage, mourning, and despair, again and again? In poems that span fragment to narrative and quiz to constraint, from procedure to prose and sequence to song, semiautomatic culls past and present for guides to a hoped-for future.Hardcover is un-jacketed.

    Here’s a body of new work to cheer about.” Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World won the 2002 New Issues Prize in Poetry, and his second book, Notes for My Body Double, won the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness will be available in May 2010.

    Broken up into four chapters, she holds your hand and takes you inward with her, from skin to flesh, to flesh to bones, from bones to all that lies within. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, The Anatomy of Being marks a very distinct time in a young girl's life, and aches and aches to be heard and devoured. 2013 Goodreads Choice Awards Poetry Finalist