Mark Thomas' fourth book is a funny account of a challenge that had national repercussions. The challenge was to perform 100 acts of dissent within the year or donate £1000 to UKIP. (Nothing like a little incentive.) The targets were multiple; from corporate greed and public service inanities to infringements of rights. This is his account of the adventure and is sure to inspire. This book contains many photos and graphics, and so has been produced as a fixed-format colour ebook. It is only recommended for the newer, colour ebook readers.

    Simultaneously, Vintage Canada is delighted to publish Downie's first book of poetry, under the same title. It will also contain the lyrics to the sixteen songs on the record.Coke Machine Glow is a rich, haunting collection that reveals both the public and private selves of one of Canada's most enigmatic musicians. In poetry that is urban, gritty and political, as well as romantic, nostalgic and whimsical, Downie allows us a glimpse inside his world. With his acute and observing eye, he gives us snapshots of his life, both on the road and at home; he writes of loneliness and isolation; of longing and desire; of the present and the past; of dreams and nightmares; love lost and love of family. Ultimately, this book is about the distances that bridge and separate us.Layered and deceptively simple, imbued with Downie's wit, insight, anger, compassion and rock 'n'roll edge, Coke Machine Glow is a remarkable debut. With its publication, Gordon Downie becomes a part of the wonderful literary tradition of Canadian songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell who are also poets.

    Marcus Hubbard, rich, despotic and despised, made a fortune during the Civil War by running the blockade and worse. In his family life he is equally injurious: one son he bulldozes while the other he holds in contempt for his frailty. By Marcus's side stands his mentally deranged wife and, finally, Regina, the adored daughter amoral, conniving, and beautiful as an evil flower. Marcus, it would seem, has been on the top of the heap long enough and someone must depose him. Turning the tables on a tyrant has always made for high drama, and when Hellman puts her brilliant talents to work on such a theme the result is a play of great theatrical intensity.

    Stone's poems blend the personal with dimensions of the larger world in a manner reminiscent of the late William Stafford. Few poets have this gift for taking the workings of ordinary life and fusing them with a poetic process that sustains intense emotion, allowing human experience to be felt through the mysteries of language.... Ruth Stone belongs to every generation of poets who have taken the responsibility to give back to the world." —The Bloomsbury Review"This volume rightly secures (Stone's) status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three." —Harvard ReviewWhat Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief. . . . Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.When I forget to weep,I hear the peeping tree toadscreeping up the bark.Love lies asleepand dreams that everythingis in its golden net;and I am caught there, too,when I forget.A recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ruth Stone has taught at numerous American universities. The author of eleven books of poetry, she has lived in Vermont since 1957.

    With her marriage shattered, Erin Belieu sifts the wreckage for the black box, the record of disaster. Propelled by a blistering and clarifying rage, she composed at fever pitch and produced riveting, unforgettable poems, such as the ten-part sequence “In the Red Dress I Wear to Your Funeral”:I root through your remains,looking for the black box. Nothing leftbut glossy chunks, a pimp’s platinumtooth clanking inside the urn. I play youover and over, my beloved conspiracy,my personal Zapruder film—look. . .When Belieu was invited by the Poetry Foundation to keep a public journal on their new website, readers responded to the Black Box poems, calling them “dark, twisted, disturbed, and disturbing” and Belieu a “frightening genius.” All true.

    The collection follows a restless, nervy, cosmically abandoned speaker failing at the aspirational markers of adulthood as she flips from city to city, from enchantment to disgust, always reemerging—just barely—on the trains and bridges and bar stools of New York City. A child of the Indian ocean diaspora, Fernandes enacts the humor and devastation of what it means to exist as a body of contradictions. Her interpretations are muddied. Her feminism is accusatory, messy. Her homelands are theoretical and rootless. The poet converses with goats and throws a fit at a tarot reading; she loves the intimacy of strangers during turbulent plane rides and has dark fantasies about the “hydrogen fruit” of nuclear fallout. Ultimately, these poems possess an affection for the doomed: false beloveds, the hounded earth, civilizations intent on their own ruin. Fernandes skillfully interrogates where to put our fury and, more importantly, where to direct our mercy.

    This collection of persona poems tells the story of the infamous Lewis & Clark expedition from the point of view of Clark's personal slave, York. The poems form a narrative of York's inner and outer journey, before, during and after the expedition--a journey from slavery

    While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

    The poet has said of himself and his work: "I am not an experimentalist or an inventor, but a derivative poet, drawing my art from the resources given by a generation of masters––Stein, Williams, Pound; back of that by the generations of poets that have likewise been dreamers of the Cosmos as Creation and Man as Creative Spirit; and by the work of contemporaries: Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and Denise Levertov."

    When Josie Messina's wunderkind 12-year-old son earns a full scholarship to one of New Jersey's toniest private schools, this hardworking, cash-strapped single mom is intimidated. Will she ever fit in with the wealthy and fashionable mothers of Little Fawn Country Day? But when Josie runs into Country Day's most famous parent, rock legend Billy Stand - known to her as the boy she used to babysit - their embrace in the school parking lot, viewed by three of the school's most influential social butterflies, rockets her to "A list" status. What happens next will bring truth to the warning, "Be careful what you wish for." This timely, irreverent send-up of contemporary academia -- and the wicked ways of the one percent -- will delight any parent who has ever been dragged to a PTA fundraiser, has sweated out their children's grades and college prospects, or who has wondered what, exactly, their kids are learning at school all day.Editorial Review"A smart, poignant fiction debut...What makes this work stand out is Matthews' handling of social issues such as class boundaries and the state of education in the country...The cause-and-effect relationship intertwined in each plot element creates moments of laughter and societal insight, making the novel an entertaining, shrewd read."- Kirkus Reviews

    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.

    Miikwan and Dez are best friends. Miikwan is Anishinaabe; Dez is Inninew. Together, the teens navigate the challenges of growing up in an urban landscape – they’re so close, they even completed their Berry Fast together. However, when Dez’s grandmother becomes too sick, Dez is told she can’t stay with her anymore. With the threat of a group home looming, Dez can’t bring herself to go home and disappears. Miikwan is devastated, and the wound of her missing mother resurfaces. Will Dez’s community find her before it’s too late? Will Miikwan be able to cope if they don’t?

    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

    This small collection of poems explores how time influences loving another, loving yourself and loving the life you own. This quick but fulfilling read, explores these topics in three sections: the head, the heart and the lungs.

    . . any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence."—Rodney Jones, Poetry Society of America, William Carlos Williams Award citationTrances of the Blast is a major new collection from recent National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Mary Ruefle. Full of Ruefle's particular wisdom and wit, the poems deliver her imaginative take on the world's rifts—its paradoxes, failures, and loss—and help us better appreciate its redeeming strangeness.If only I'd understood that lonelinesswas just loneliness, only lonelinessand nothing more.But I was blind.Little did I know.If only I'd invented salt.I might have died happy.I wish I loved you,but you can't have everything.Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of prose, poetry, and erasures. She is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. Her book of lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was named a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives and teaches in Vermont.