Search results for ""green writers press""

The Hopper is a lively environmental literary magazine, along with stunning visual art, from Green Writers Press that strives towards an invigorated understanding of nature's place in human life. The annual publication in a series is part of a new phase in nature writing that seeks to include a modern consciousness in narratives of place.The Hopper believes that in order to refashion our lives to accommodate the knowledge we have of our environmental crisis, we have a lot of cultural heavy lifting to do. To reacquaint ourselves meaningfully with the natural world we have to turn our interpretive, inquisitive, and inspired faculties upon it. Through what we publish and the communities we encourage, The Hopper seeks to be a leader in this cultural re-centering and can be used for environmental education and discussion.

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The Hopper is a lively environmental literary magazine, along with stunning visual art, from Green Writers Press that strives towards an invigorated understanding of nature's place in human life. The annual publication is part of a new phase in nature writing that seeks to include a modern consciousness in narratives of place. The Hopper believes that in order to refashion our lives to accommodate the knowledge we have of our environmental crisis, we have a lot of cultural heavy lifting to do. To reacquaint ourselves meaningfully with the natural world we have to turn our interpretive, inquisitive, and inspired faculties upon it. Through what we publish and the communities we encourage, The Hopper seeks to be a leader in this cultural re-centering and can be used for environmental education and discussion.

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In a debut novel from Green Writers Press by Jonathan Howland, the austere beauty and high exposure of mountain adventure provide the context and the measure for what it means to be alive for climbing partners Joe Holland and Pete Hunter—until one of them isn’t. When the book opens, it’s the mid-80s. Joe Holland, the novel’s narrator, is a climber and a seeker, but mostly he’s Pete Hunter’s shadow. The two meet in college and spend the next ten years living at the base of any rock that appears scalable, most of them near Yosemite and California’s High Sierra. The joys and strains of their friendship comprise the novel’s first half. In the second, the bare bones–obsession, grief, love, and repair—come into stark relief when Pete’s grown son Will calls Joe back into climbing, into the past, and into breathless vitality.

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Unable to cease their conversation that became Beso the Donkey (MSU Press, 2010), and A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (Green Writers Press, 2015), Jarrette found himself addressing Ekaterina in a series of love poems after she suddenly died in 2014. Many are apostrophes, all unsentimental, sometimes harrowing, unflinching, yet full of the exotic spirit, joy, and humor, that shall always be this remarkable, noble, woman. Also fluent in Russian, Italian, Ancient Greek, and Spanish, Katya was a trauma medicine specialist who worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and other international organizations. Her medical team was forced to witness atrocities in Nigeria, perform triage, and subsequently kidnapped, unpersoned, and ransomed. The poems—lamentation, requiem, praise—are visited by her muses: Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Sappho, Dante, Anne Carson, Giacometti, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is an unblinking, breathing, monument to love, to the other, a psalm of living fully alive on a planet under seige, and further investigation into the mystery itself which is Jarrette's life's work.

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More than “the good old days,” destined only for the memoir and history-buff markets; more than the “community-building” market to describe America’s fall from working and playing together books, Landmark Memories tells stories, vignettes, really, of a Vermont village. Describing the school, the library, Main Street, and more with an array of people from the town’s iceman, teacher, neighbor, village worker, and kids living and playing together, focused on the 1930s and 1940s. The time when Americans naturally lived and cared together in village life. These are the togetherness stories that people around the globe are now dreaming about from their isolation in our pandemic times. Stories about family, friends, and community, as they search for wholeness as never before, dreaming of America’s best democracy.

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Born to two thieves, Blaze cannot escape his parents’ legacy. With a scar on his soul that marks him as a tool of the Dark Goddess Mykondra, Blaze desperately invokes Eldon, the god of neutrality, giving Blaze his own use. Blaze’s life takes a turn though when he stumbles upon Lady Goldenrod of Mahdurna, who sees past Blaze’s gruff exterior. Then, Guild Master Locke sends Blaze on a mission with his mentor Mason and their journey turns from a simple delivery to a dangerous assignment inside a theocratic country that he has despised since he was young. While he is away with Mason, Goldenrod goes missing. Will Blaze be able to emerge from darkness to find himself and save his beloved Lady Goldenrod?

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Many of the poems in this book come from the dark corners of my heart. By giving verbal form to these ideas I hope to be able to at least look at them if not actually confront and diminish them. They reflect many of my regrets, sadness, disappointments (often in myself), and perceptions of the world in which I live. If any reader can identify with some of these ideas, then he or she will know that he or she is not alone. That in itself would make the poems purposeful. In my efforts to become a better human being, I have come across Buddhism. The Buddhist core values of compassion, equanimity, and kindness are exactly what I have needed. Readers will find reflections of my religious beliefs in a number of these works. Poems rattle around in my mind, sometimes for weeks, until I have NO choice but to let them out. Many of these poems are organic. I am not clear on the form they will take until I actually sit down to write. Others are attempts to use form, meter, and rhyme, whatever feels right. These lyrics give voice to my inner demons, and allow me to share them with the world. So I send them out, hoping that they may bring someone insight or relief.

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Carrie, a business manager who always wanted to be a dancer, has two commitments today. She made a promise to her late father to move Cousin Ella, a former Paris café dancer, from her condemned Harlem apartment to a safe place. She's also committed to catch a flight to Seattle with her husband for his new job. But Cousin Ella resists leaving the apartment where she's had salons with Langston Hughes. She also has a mysterious gift that she wants Carrie to earn. If she does, a revelation about Carrie's father and his cousin Langston Hughes will change her life.

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The poems in A Common Name for Everything build idiosyncratic worlds around the themes of nature, home, parenting, and naming—worlds that are at once poignant and absurd: a professional namer of lakes explains his standards; the rural gods are given names; a study of sheep results in loneliness. Steeped in sound play and borrowing academic language to create a specimen lens, these poems bask in the local as they seek to name even the commonest earthly things.

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Old New Worlds intertwines the immigrant stories of the author and her great-great grandmother. Sarah Barker and her new husband sail from England in 1815 to minister to the indigenous Khoihoi in South Africa's Eastern Cape. In the midst of conflict, illness, and natural disasters, Sarah bears sixteen children. Two hundred years later, Judith leaves post apartheid South Africa with her new American husband to immigrate to the United States. She is drawn to Sarah's immigrant story in the context of her own experience, and she sets out to try and trace her. In the process, she finds a soul mate.

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It’s a long, tough journey, but one that’s filled with adventure and natural beauty, new friends, and big dreams. Told in simple verse, the story works as a gentle but lively introduction to monarch biology and ecology, emphasizing habitat needs and our role as active stewards in the natural world. Sidebars add further information and details to engage and expand children’s fascination with butterflies and other pollinators. An afterword completes the story with additional explanation of environmental threats to monarch habitat and suggestions on how to learn more and help them through wildlife-friendly gardening. The afterword also makes explicit for any readers who didn’t recognize it already that Janey’s story parallels that of a true American folk hero, Johnny Appleseed.

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DG is five the first time her mother goes away. She'll go away again and again before DG finally understands why: mental illness and a manipulating husband. DG's family aren't like other families. Her father moves them constantly. Moving, along with the stigma of mental illness, isolates the family. In public, they seem the perfect American dream. In private they grow increasingly unstable. Darling Girl unfolds in a series of vignettes spanning ten years and four continents. Traveling through the fifties and sixties and from apartheid South Africa to the capitals of Europe, the family live like so many dancing bears in a traveling circus with her father as the ringmaster. DG's story is both personal and universal. She's on a journey from innocence to experience; to the realization that her mother's illness isn't the family's only problem, it's not even the main one.

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Normal0falsefalsefalseEN-USJAX-NONE Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, past poets laureate of their respective states and both nationally recognized writers who've given their lives to their art, have conspired to write an unusual book of essays. They've picked a wide variety of topics and headed out as they wished with each, covering a lot of territory, both artistic and memoiristic. Some of the pieces, like "Wild Animals," are downright silly; some, like "Sex," "Music," and "Food," are provocative; some, like "Clothes," "Sports," and "Houses," appear ordinary but are ultimately revealing. The final essay offers, from each, a personal look at how a poet lives and writes in this troubling time. The excitement of this collection is in the details—how lives are lived and poems written over time, and at last, an entire body of work as witness.

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In southern Vermont, the annual freezing and thawing of the earth forces stones to the surface, breaking asphalt, disrupting civilized life. This is the setting for the stories in Frost Heaves, a physically harsh and rural place within a few hours' drive of Boston and New York. It is a landscape where retreat, even escape, to a quaint and bucolic lifestyle is regularly upset by reminders that a human is, in the end, another part of the natural world and a part of a larger social organism. In this collection, an eclectic mix of characters interact, negotiate community, and encounter the natural world—bears, otters, moose, insects—in confrontations with the reality of their own individual strengths and weaknesses, the welling up of hard truths in the seasons of each life. T Stores is a storyteller, probably because she grew up in a huge extended American Southern family and spent much of her childhood hiding under the kitchen table listening to her elders' gossip and fables of the past. Teresa Stores writes with compassion and insight, finding the inescapable truths hiding in plain sight layered over an ordinary life. Though these stories are individually complete, in the book collection they are also connected by theme, character, and setting, and with an understanding that individual experience is a shared human story sometimes only barely perceived as overlapping, cohesive, and common. The book's structure is both seasonal and cyclical, with each section of stories (each close third person point of view, focused on the experience of a protagonist) introduced by a story that shifts point of view in rapid succession, connecting the community of voices to place.The titular story in the collection was selected winner of the Kore Press Fiction Prize, published as a chapbook and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. "Big Night" placed 13th in the Writers' Digest Annual Competition and was recently published in BlueLine. "Fisher" was short-listed for the Fish Story Prize and published in Literary Mama. "Fresh Air" was featured as the "story of the month" at Unmanned Press. "Labyrinth," placed 9th in the Writer's Digest "Short-Short" competition and was long-listed for the Fish Story Prize. "Love/Theory #7" was published in Sinister Wisdom.

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We Are Vermont: Resist, Build, Rise contains:

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In 2013 my wife, Jeanne, and I, she in her late sixties, I in my early seventies, set out to fulfill our long held dream of living in the woods for a year. Before leaving our home in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, I contacted the editors of Tempo, the monthly news magazine in the Town of Lac Brome (which I will refer to as “Lac Brome”), to enquire whether they would be interested in receiving reports of our progress in the endeavour. They said, “Yes.” This book is based upon those articles. My original intention was to produce a work echoing the objectives of Thoreau who, in addition to describing his daily life in his chosen wilderness, commented on the mores and politics of his time in his Walden. However, each time that I penned such a commentary, I realized that it detracted from the essence of our experience. The reaction to the Tempo articles proved that the unfolding of the tale of our daily lives was all that was required to engender intense interest and comment. Thus this memoir has to do exclusively with living in the woods. How It All Began We arrived in the mid-afternoon of June 15, 2013. The car and trailer were loaded to the gills. Scooter, our cat, lay sedated in her cage. She does not like to travel and hates being in her cage. She, particularly, does not like the movement of the car if we are going over any sort of bump, bumps being inevitable on the thirty-five km of forestry roads we take once leaving the highway in La Tuque. The unloading of our stuff and the carrying of it to the cabin was a major effort, all being by packsacks, boxes and bags. The parking spot on the track in is 350 m from the cabin. I made ten trips, thus round trips totaling 7,000 m, 3,500 of them loaded. We had decided that to be true to our wilderness endeavor, we would not have a road excavated to the cabin. The ground, as was discovered during the building process, is too rough for anything other than a high clearance ATV (all-terrain vehicle). The track, from where we park the truck, which leads to the cabin, is a series of drops over rock ledges. Given the nature of the ground and that the ATVs and their trailers were generally fully- loaded, it was not surprising that two of them were wrecked during the building process. The carrying of immediately required articles and food accomplished, we then indulged in a soothing swim and returned to the cabin as enthused and as excited as newlyweds. We opened a bottle of wine on the west-facing balcony, watched the sun set and rejoiced to see a pair of loons on the lake. Supper, then bed, exhausted but exhilarated. ******************** For about as long as I have known Jeanne she has wanted to spend an entire year, three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days, in the woods. This is not motivated by a desire to be a hermit or because she is anti-social. To paraphrase Montaigne, she is quite content living a private life but that does not mean that she is unsuited to a public one. After all, she insisted, it is only for one year. When I asked, “Might it be that you would never come back?” she answered, “It’s only for a year.” I should immediately add that this was not to be a year alone. Jeanne insisted that I was part of the plan and was to go with her. I like to think that this was because she loves me but if that was only part of the reason, for she would need a hewer of wood and fetcher of water, a man servant in the general sense, then I was content, for I need looking after myself and our lives have been inter-dependent since the day of our marriage which was over fifty years ago. Our adult lives have been outwardly quite normal. I am a lawyer specializing in maritime law, meaning having to do with ships. Jeanne has been a school teacher, first at Westhill High School and then at the Convent of the Sacred heart, both in Montreal. She then embraced her childhood dream of being a ballet dancer, which lead to her becoming a choreographer, teacher and performer of dance, first on the teaching staff of les Ballets Jazz de MontrÉal, then as owner of le Centre de Dance Jeanne Marler, which included an annual, international, two-week dance seminar with closing performance, called Focus on Jazz. It attracted aspiring pre-professionals from around the world. At a certain point, she decided that if she could no longer physically perform the dance movements at the level which she had attained in her performance career, it was time to move on. She obtained a diploma from the New York School of Interior Design and embarked upon that profession until she found it too commercially driven, the demands of the clients too often conflicting with Jeanne’s sense of what was artistically and/or practically appropriate. She then opened a performing and fine arts camp for children and adolescents, set in the pristine hills and woods of Vermont, which she ran with great success for three years, until the property which she had leased became no longer available, due to the owner’s intention to build a hotel on the site. In the mid-nineteen-nineties she turned to painting. Her sketches, oil paintings and photography illuminate this book. “But why in the woods?” many asked. Most Canadians think of going south rather than north for vacations or retirement. Only Jeanne might properly be able to answer that question. She is a spiritual person, very much in the Celtic tradition. When we go to the woods she becomes very quiet. On family vacations to wilderness locations, the children used to say, “That’s it for talking to Mum. She will turn into a rock or a mushroom or something for as long as we are here”. And so it was. On our departures from such places she often cried. We asked, “What’s the matter?” There would be no answer. I think it had and has simply to do with leaving places where her spirit finds its natural home.

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Longleaf is a chapbook of poems deeply rooted in place and the landscape of John Saad's native coastal Alabama. This wide-ranging and wise collection shows the poet's bone-deep connection to home that stems from childhood through early adulthood. With finely wrought images and specialized yet lyrical language that recall the best of Rodney Jones and Philip Levine, Saad brings us into his world of the Deep South, where 'the fumbled light of live oaks' mingles with 'the ferrous / howls / of valley dogs.' In these pages, memories of family are woven with observations of a natural world in constant conversation with civilization and the machines that encroach upon it. Still, Saad's poems prove that his environment can and will endure, no matter how marked with freeways and 'smokestacks belching black.' Windows still give us views of an 'anvil sky' dissolving 'over the purple pulse / of switchgrass,' and we can—like the guitar he once abandoned on a riverbank—lose ourselves in 'the cutbank's slow refrains,' at last redeemed by 'the water's dark applause.'

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The Dark Edge of the Bluff engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. The poems tackle a vast geography of recollection—from Fiesole to the Okefenokee to the turnings and obsessions of the author's mind itself. In testing memory's capacity for multiple truths, and in discovering its inherent limitations, this collection grapples with the simultaneity of memory as an act of self-preservation, self-creation, and relentless re-creation.

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Maine is a talisman of the American imagination, offering beauty and wildlife to tourists and natives. Over the last few years, Jim has published many essays about the wonders and challenges of Maine’s environment, and One Man’s Maine collects and edits them into sixteen pairs. The first essays of each pair employ the natural icons of Maine—lobster, moose, blueberries, lupine—to reach into matters of human significance. These are familiar essays that combine science and belief, observation and emotion. The second essays are broader and more discursive and take on a fuller range of experiences in this beloved state.

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In Infinite Good: The Mountains of William James, author and naturalist, J. Parker Huber, follows the famed naturalist and philosopher William James sojourns in New England. The Adirondacks—where neither Muir nor Thoreau tread—James revealed, had the greatest influence on his life. He made annual pilgrimages there in late nineteenth century. He bought land there, as well as a farm at the south base of Mount Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which became his country home. Drawing on James's faithfully recorded itineraries, author J. Parker Huber provides comprehensive and well-documented summaries about the excursions of William James and his family. William James became increasingly aware of nature's beneficence. In 1872, then thirty, he confided to Henry in two letters what he had drawn from his Maine coast experiences that summer. In the first, of 24 August, he wrote that the "nervouspuckers" of his mind had been "smoothed out gently & fairly by the sweet influences of many a lie on a hill top at mt. Desert with sky & sea & Islands before me, by many a row, and a couple of sails, and by my bath and siesta on the blazing sand this morn." And, again in the fall of 1872, he wrote that he had "never so much as this summer felt the soothing and hygienic effects of nature upon the human spirit." Earlier his enjoyment of nature had been a "luxury, but this time t'was as a vital food, or medicine." And so it remained for his life.J Parker Huber provides a fascinating look at the prominent philosopher's love of the mountains and the solace he found there. Readers will appreciate the scholarly research, but also participate in the alpinist's adventures and revelations.

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Winter Ready is a 96-page collection of new poems by a Vermont-based writer who draws from his impressive repertoire of observations and physical landscape of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont to bring to the reader poems with universal meaning and at times a painful acuity. Kinsey opens the collection perched up high on the chimney top, working and observing his surroundings, and throughout the book, he never really gets down-he chronicles a people and a place and a time-and keeps the hard work of writing poetry hidden in the seeming effortless verse that is often funny and poignant, yet always sharp and clear. In this new collection by a renowned Vermont poet, the setting is the same, but the voice rings true to the people and the land they inhabit, always respectful of the native peoples who came before and the awesome power of a glacier that carved a path in its wake. These poems evoke a fully realized view of the world the poet inhabits, an awareness of labor and its changing nature. The book moves through poem after glowing poem, evoking natural history, flora and fauna, with a place-based and focused attention.

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The Bird Book is a children's alphabet book by artist and educator, Brian D. Cohen, with rhyming couplets written by Holiday Eames. Created for their son, David, each letter of the alphabet in both uppercase and lowercase, corresponds to the bird illustrated on each page. The description can be read aloud to especially inquisitive children, or be enjoyed by an adult reader alike. Originally hand-colored and printed letterpress, only 26 copies were made. Now gathered in book form for the first time, printed in four colors on beautiful recycled paper, these stunning prints will also appeal to adults interested in art books, small press books, printmaking, and birds. Their children and grandchildren will thank the parents and gift givers as well, for the birds in the book, and the accompanying couplets will open up a world of art and poetry that will become a family favorite.

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Fling Diction is a book about the vulnerability of desire; these poems explore different styles of relationships, including queer love, polyamory, familial drama, dog and human companionship, and longing in isolation. The characters find and lose each other in rural and urban settings; their experiences are intensified by the sensuality and ferocity of nature. This book is a record of the speaker’s blunders, embraces, and revelations as she seeks knowledge of the elusive other.

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Leland Kinsey, often referred to as the poet laureate of Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, died of cancer on September 14, 2016. He was sixty-six years old. Having recently published a volume of his much-celebrated collected poems (Galvanized, Green Writers Press, 2016), Leland left behind two manuscripts: Last Correspondence, and an untitled sequence of poems, many written or revised during his last illness. This volume is a posthumous compilation of those two collections.Last Correspondence, which was written over a period of four decades, is a rich poetic narrative, in letter format, between friends, lovers, and family members. Ranging from the vast deserts and ranches of the American Southwest, to the mountains and hillside farms of northern Vermont, and on to Labrador's taiga, with side excursions to Machu Picchu and the Isle of Skye, Last Correspondence evokes on every page Emerson's definition of "the kingly bard" who "must smite the chords rudely and hard." Then come the incomparable “Final Poems,” a cascade of stories, characters, and images, mostly from the Northeast Kingdom, and focusing on the recurrent themes of family, work, and place, which have run through Kinsey's poems from the start. Walt Whitman would have loved these poems, so, too, Robert Frost. They represent the finest works of a writer who will always be known as the truest voice of the remote and beautiful "kingdom" of Vermont settled by his Scottish ancestors seven generations ago, and preserved, in perpetuity, in hundreds of the most human and original poems in the history of American letters.

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Red Kite, Blue Sky, the debut poetry collection from Madeleine May Kunin, celebrates life and the natural world, occasioned by the birth of grand-children, the memories of friendship and past birthdays/Bar Mitzvahs, a gift of plum-colored gloves from the poet’s daughter, the Sicilian sun which “melts my argument against myself," with sharp observations and humor. Like Emily Dickinson before her, Kunin does not shy away from death; rather she embraces the anticipation “before death drags me deep,” the gap in her life when her beloved husband dies, the fear of immigration to America during World War II with “an H for Hebrew, I found out later,” and the sadness of being isolated as an older woman living alone during the pandemic. For years Kunin was caught in the tempo of politics—as governor, as a federal official, and as an ambassador—but as she eased into retirement from public life, she found a door that opened for her to explore the multi-layered language of poetry.

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0.63 seconds. That’s the amount of time Angela Brennan has to process the oncoming truck that destroys half of her family and irrevocably alters her life. Not long after the accident, death intervenes once more and snatches her remaining family member. Facing life alone, Angela returns to work as a cardiac surgeon, saving other people’s lives, but questioning why hers was spared. Desperate and distraught, Angela makes the decision to join her family by taking her own life. Before she acts on her plan, however, she receives an anonymous note indicating that her daughter’s death could have been avoided. The information provides Angela with renewed purpose and she becomes determined to find meaning in her catastrophic loss. Angela confronts the healthcare power brokers and discovers lies, complicity, and corruption at the highest levels. As she uncovers the truth about her daughter’s death, barriers are thrown in her way that threaten to destroy all she has left: her career and reputation. Devil’s Grace follows Angela’s path from devastation to redemption, as her decision to choose hope over despair and kindness over cruelty tells a timeless, yet timely tale.

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Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop, edited by Stephen Cramer, is a vibrant anthology of 400 pages, including poems by everyone from Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Rita Dove to Yusef Komunyakaa, Kim Addonizio, Kevin Young, and Danez Smith. The book contains 88 poets in all (the number of keys on a piano) and is split into three sections: poems about jazz, poems about blues and rock, and poems about hip-hop. The now famous quote -- writing about music is like dancing about architecture -- has been attributed to everyone from Theolonious Monk to Frank Zappa to Elvis Costello. How can one pin down an invisible craft like music with the more absolute definitions of language? Well, the poets in Turn It Up!, responding to everyone from Louis Armstrong to the Rolling Stones to Public Enemy, prove that it can be done, and done in style.

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Eleven Miles to June, a debut poetry collection from Oakland, California author, Ha Kiet Chau, focuses on a woman's journey from childhood to adulthood—her movements, her nuances in black and white, in technicolor and sound. The poems explore themes such as self-identity, gender, assimilation, culture, women's issues, and social challenges.

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In the early 20th Century mining town of Ely, Minnesota, Joe Seliga taught himself how to build wood and canvas canoes. What began as a life full of curiosity and adventure grew into a passion for the land and its people. Joe held a deep appreciation of wild places, cherished his close-knit family, and found joy in using his hands to create a thing of beauty and utility. Along the way, he forged a tradition of respect and integrity for the wooden canoe: if you take care of it, it will take care of you. And Joe knew that the same could be said of the earth, a good friend and a lot of other things. This biographical picture book celebrates Joe's life with canoes as well as the independent spirit that instilled a tradition of self-reliance in a whole generation of campers across the lake country of northern Minnesota.

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Total Loss Farm in Guilford, Vermont, was and is a wordy place. Its hilly acres and flimsy buildings provided a refuge from a riven country, a place to grow paragraphs and stanzas, among the tilled rows of the market garden. Peter Gould's first novel Burnt Toast was a youthful exploration of this mythic turf. Peter left the farm to pursue love and work. In Horse-Drawn Yogurt, Peter returns to offer his take on how we lived in times that seem exotic, yet oddly familiar, in this second edition, with three new stories and an introduction by Vermont author Bill Schubart. Gould is eloquent, whimsical, critical, musical, magical, and tender. The new stories in this second edtion are gems with additional line drawings by the author.

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A poetic biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), Rare Wondrous Things investigates the history of this German artist and naturalist who made groundbreaking discoveries in entomology. While Merian led an exceptional life—even traveling to Suriname at fifty-two years old in the pursuit of knowledge—her name has largely remained in obscurity, and her personal life is still shrouded in mystery. These poems recover her legacy by exploring the tensions between science and religion, professional aspirations and motherhood, wifehood and independence, and biographer and subject.

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A young boy and his sister discover the secret of the Lake Champlain monster, but decide to keep the secret to themselves in this ficticious tale. CartoonistJeff Danziger creates a fantastic adventure of brother, sister, and an old fisherman friend, in search of the great monster of Lake Champlain. They dig up clues and finally plan the expedition to end the mystery surrounding this mythical being suppossedly living under the waves. The book, both humorous and scary, presents creative characterizations, and is appropriately accompanied by charming illustrations that will delight readers of all ages.

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Inspired by the author's own experiences and observations as a child and throughout adulthood, Crosshairs tells the story of the the implosion of the traditional Boston underworld that created a vacuum for the players left at the table. Justin McGee is a high-powered attorney who moonlights as the city's most successful and highly paid assassin. Former Irish crime family member, Darby McBride, is an aging mobster looking for a new life as a sole proprietor in the reinvented underworld. Captain Caleb Frost is a hardscrabble Gloucester fisherman who comes to a crossroads between his own sense of principles and ethics and the lure of the lucrative New England heroin trade. Crosshairs is the story of three desperate individuals grappling with a world that places money and hidden desires above all else. These players are seeking not only survival, but the ability to thrive. Their unique advantage—unlike the drones of the rest of the world—is that they are devoid of any pesky morals that could get in the way of achieving their desires. Everything comes to a head when Justin is called upon to accept the most challenging assignment of his life. Little do they know, but their worlds will all tragically collide, as readers will discover, because in Boston, politics, history, and crime are all one when caught in the crosshairs…

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When a young girl, Cardy Raper told her mother, "When I grow up I want to be a scientist and make grand discoveries!" Her mother responded, "You could become a nurse." Science was a man's world then. Cardy refused to take "no" for an answer. Her dream seemed attainable when she met her mentor, Professor John "Red" Raper at the University of Chicago who said "Yes, you can be a scientist!" They became soul mates, fell in love, married, parented children, moved to Harvard, and did research together on the versatile sex life of fungi. Red's untimely death left Cardy alone in the competitive world of cutting-edge science. She carried on, obtained a doctoral degree, learned the techniques of molecular genetics, and established her own laboratory where she conducted pioneering research on the genetic and molecular determinants of sexual reproduction in a mushroom-bearing fungus with 20,000 different sexes. This fungus has served as a model organism for exploring the way in which sensing molecules, such as pheromones, function to communicate in more complex organisms.

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Sydney Lea says he hopes these columns will continue to be of interest to poetry lovers and students, but above all to the common reader. Seeking at every turn to avoid jargon, he explores how the making of a poet's art resembles the making of any reader's life. For Lea, poetry and everyday life are deeply entangled.

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Celebrate a day in the snow with Oliver who is filled with excitement for another ski season at Mount Snow in Vermont. His parents have brought him here since he was a baby and now his little brother has a ski pass too. He has a zest for adventure and loves to play outdoors, especially skiing and the occasional snowball fight. Snowflakes are a symbol throughout the book as no two of us are alike and to symbolize how children can learn to embrace their individuality and offer their own unique unique qualities. Oliver’s family has a house in Dover, Vermont, home to Mount Snow. He enjoys going to ski school where his instructors are so helpful teaching him how to put on all of his gear, his red hair always sticking out of his helmet. Oliver showed no fear skiing the "black diamond" (most difficult) trailes—is that the easiest trail? Oliver is learning all of his letters and this book is aimed to inspire learning for children beginning to read, count, and spell. The book pages are filled with soft-colored, hand-drawn art throughout that show his family and others enjoying the mountain in Vermont. Kids of all ages will enjoy spelling out the words and discover the little activities that are inside the pages of this educational experience. Oliver's family loves exploring the mountain together, they also look forward to hiking this summer and having other outdoor adventures, so readers should watch for the next edition, coming in the fall… Some things parents and educators can ask the children include: When you look through the pages, try to find your favorite snowflake. What did you learn about Mount Snow? Why is it important to embrace diversity and do things like take the MOOVER (public transportation) to burn less fossil fuel? Why is loving nature so important, now, more than ever?

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In this hauntingly unconventional novel, young Lissa Power challenges the imagination and captures the heart as she struggles to grow up under the guidance of her father, Stouten—a watchmaker, inventor, and mechanical wizard—who is easily old enough to be her grandfather.When Lissa is twelve, her mother dies from breast cancer, and the reclusive old watchmaker, now 84 years old, must oversee his daughter's coming of age. Faced with the loneliness of celibacy, the vulnerability of old age, and the responsibility of supporting two young children, Stouten remains determined to protect his beloved daughter from all harm. As Lissa matures, Stouten's authority becomes increasingly restrictive.Immersed in Stouten's old-fashioned and eccentric worldview, Lissa becomes her father's close companion, the mother of the house, and eventually her aging father's caregiver. Enmeshed in a powerful bond, father and daughter fall back on obsessive-compulsive behavior to cope with sexual trauma, sickness, poverty, old age, and death.Against a backdrop of tumultuous events in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s—the Cold War, political assassinations, the Vietnam War, peace protests, the Civil Rights movement, the moon landing, and the women's liberation movement—Stouten uses storytelling to transport Lissa back with him to the time of his childhood—a much quieter time, but not an idyllic one, when horses and oxen plowed the fields and folks moved more slowly, with the rhythm of nature. Here At the Far End of Nowhere, father and daughter weave fact with fiction and merge reality with fantasy to reveal a broader truth.

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Where We Live is master story-teller W. D. Wetherell's fifth story collection, and his first in ten years, bringing together the best of his recent fictions. The stories exemplify the qualities readers and critics have praised in the past, while continuing to explore new directions in style, theme, and characterization. He illumines contemporary American life and culture by focusing on the forgotten places and people living on the edges, from a young Somali immigrant who finds an unlikely mentor in his attempt to come to terms with his new home, to a widower faced with the everyday challenges of his first day alone.

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A trailblazing environmental educator raised his children in the heart of nature. His story shows other parents how they can counter today's pervasive "nature deficit." Updated wtih new essays.When David Sobel's children,Tara and Eli, were toddlers, he set out to integrate a wide range of nature experiences into their family life, play, and story telling. Blending his passion as a parent with his professional expertise, he created adventures tailored to their developmental stages: cultivating empathy with animals in early childhood, exploring the woods in middle childhood, and devising rites of passage in adolescence.Wild Play is Sobel's vivid and moving memoir of their journey and an in spiring guide for all parents who seek to help their children bond with the natural world. Through this family's experiences, we observe how free play in nature hones a sense of wonder, provides healthy challenges, and nurtures earth stewardship. "Parents need to support kids' access to independent outdoor play," says Sobel. "Of course they should use judgment, but the benefits outweigh the risks."Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods identified the urgent problem of "nature deficit" in today's children, sounding the alarm for parents, educators, and policy-makers. Wild Play is a hopeful response, offering families myriad ways to blaze their own trails.

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In The Road to Walden North, New England author Sheila Post offers timely insights for a new age still grappling with issues raised by Thoreau over 150 years ago. An elegiac Walden revisited, this resplendent novel invites readers to accompany the transcendental journey of Harvard Professor Dr. Kate Brown—from talking the talk of theory to walking the walk of experience along the less traveled road of Thoreauvian simplicity. While deftly engaging with the motifs of Thoreau’s classic, chapter by chapter, The Road to Walden North also transcends its literary context, through its richly nuanced chronicle of the life-altering interactions among four individuals whose worlds converge and collide on the campus of Harvard University. The narrative depicts both the desperate and deliberate lives of its main characters as they consider roads taken and not: Heather Channing, a back-to-the-lander student adrift in the elite world of Harvard; William Channing, her organic grower, Buddhist, Ph.D. father, a cultural exile in the north woods of Vermont; Blake Prentiss, a Boston Brahmin with multi-generational family ties to Harvard, and Kate Brown, a newly hired Assistant Professor, whose life revolves around her academic work, until forced to grapple with the implications of the themes she teaches in her freshmen seminar on Walden. A luminous tapestry of dreams lost and found, The Road to Walden North will continue to rewild the lives and souls of its readers long after arriving in Walden North.

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Tucked away in a remote stream valley in Vermont, a dynasty of beavers has nearly completed the restoration of the meadows and ponds that adorned this stream in the days before the beavers of a continent were turned into top hats. Willow, Popple, and their progeny begin the night's work of dam repair, scent marking, tree felling until a soft call alerts them to the arrival of the strange honorary member of their clan, this book's author, Patti Smith. They scramble ashore and poke eagerly about her feet as she prepares to picnic and to record the events that transpire on the shores of Popple's Pond. Through the seasons, and through the years, these records-transformed into interwoven vignettes-invite the reader to enter the world of the beavers and the other inhabitants of the wetlands. Meet Terrible Jack the lonely moose, Henri the civilized goose, and the myriad small creatures that populate the night forest. The author, a native of this landscape, brings a naturalist's eye and a compassionate voice to these stories. After three years with the beavers, readers are invited to accompany the author to other worlds where different characters await. Keep this book wherever you have a moment for a short adventure- to follow the trail of a bear cub through the moonlight, enter the low-roofed world of the snowshoe hare, or to stand in the midst of a melee of migrating amphibians. These stories offer respite to those wearied by the barrage of bad news, and a chance to reconnect with the nature that perseveres around us.

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The Girl in the Yellow Pantsuit collects the best-loved of Becca Balint’s weekly columns on politics, history, and culture. Becca’s curiosity, humor, and deep affection for her subjects provide readers with new ways of examining trenchant problems. Her clear-eyed perspectives on subjects as wide-ranging as American politics, global affairs, education policy, and parenthood challenge us to think more deeply about our own place in the world and the impact we want to leave.

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Every Year thousands of educators are accused of physical abuse. Some are guilty and are prosecuted, but hundreds who are innocent are forced to surrender their licenses. This is what happened to Billie. Deceit and betrayal threatened her survival, extinguished her life’s dream, and erased her sense of self worth. She wondered if she could ever trust again. Rejected by family and friends, she was forced to reinvent every aspect of her entire life. When a catastrophic fire crippled her community, and individuals grappled with personal tragedy, she gained a deeper understanding of the gift of forgiveness and the power of hope. Her brave struggles saved not only her life but also the lives of others. At times brutally painful, at other times hugely positive, Today My Name Is Billie reveals how a single lie can spread like fire and destroy all that it touches.

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James Monroe is a sophisticated American professional on mission for The World Bank in Africa during the early 1990's. Despite his worldiness, his actions betray a late twentieth century innocent abroad who embodies both the bravado and the debilitating insecurities of the modern American male. Set in Zimbabwe, Kenya and Bombay, India, Mr. Monroe's journey into authenticity results in a series of failed relationships that reveal the dark, enigmatic recesses of his complex personality and eventually land him in a hellhole prison in Bombay. His tragedy unfolds into an ending that no one, especially Monroe, could have possibly predicted or imagined. In its exploration of American male stereotypes and in its suggestion of vulnerability as a key to masculine authenticity, Victoria Falls dares to embrace those humane qualities of love, kindness and creativity that have of late been extolled as the provenance of soul searching women but have been largely ignored in American fiction about men.

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New England, 1643. In a walled English village crouched at the edge of a wilderness believed to be haunted by monsters and devil-worshipping savages, Will Poole chafes against the constraints of Puritan society and is visited by strange hallucinations that fill him with unease. Hunting in the forest, he encounters Squamiset, an enigmatic native elder whose influence will open the door to possibilities well beyond the narrow existence his upbringing led him to expect. The meeting leads to a dangerous collision of worldviews, an epic sea voyage, and the making of an unforgettable friendship. Green Writers Press is thrilled to present new paperback and audio editions of Will Poole’s Island, a novel of literary adventure, mystery, and wonder that offers readers of all ages an experience of early America that feels fresh and entirely relevant to our own times.

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A chapter book for advanced readers set in a chain of tropical islands . . .This story charts the intertwining friendships of a crab, a goat, a bird, and a gecko. Along the way, there are the usual challenges of our eat-or-be-eaten world. The perils of timidity, confusion, and self-doubt. The enticements of vanity and routine. The rewards of fearless generosity and genuine trust.

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This is an engaging handbook to launch a movement of individuals to tackle global warming by simply retooling our daily actions. Easy proactive steps develop a long term perspective based in civility, integrity and an invigorating love for our earth. Save money, lose clutter, live well, feel happy and healthier as you pull for the planet. Make smart changes through a bottoms up strategy for now where each of us is empowered to make a difference in little ways that trend to big solutions.The Movement of One is both the individual and all of us connected in this common goal. Pass this book on. We are the change.

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