A Tainted Lovers Evolution is based on some of the authors true life encounters and relates to situations involving family not accepting you for your sexuality, friends hating instead of helping, as well as mental, physical and emotional abuse.

I was going to title this book Spoken Word Necessity because I feel speaking aloud is necessary. I thought it was perfect since this is a book of poetry. Although the title describes my book, it does not capture my image. Spoken Word Necessity gives us an opportunity to speak, but what about? We can talk about love, mistakes, lessons, blessings, progression, regression, happiness, sadness, despair, encouragement, any and all things that can’t be suppressed. I am speaking out loud about evolving. This book of poetry demonstrates life experiences from which lessons were learned. I inadvertently put what I needed in the universe within my poetry and have had those needs come to fruition. Queenism is whatever greatness and growth you want it to be in your life. For me, queenism is the ability to manifest before time (BT) what is nourishing for a lifetime. This rhythmic collection of thoughts and emotions are presented in a soft and raw but honest manner. They display growth of a young African American girl into a spiritually inclined mother, wife and developed woman , truly showing that we are all a work in progress. Nonetheless, spoken words are necessary for evolving into something great. Evolution into Queenism is my journey to being the best me.

Addressing the need to understand the role of love in life, this compendium of startling insights relates love to the spiritual development in each of six universal archetypes. Attempting to answer such questions as What is love? How do we find it and how can we keep it? Why are there so many puzzling forms of it? and Why do so many people get it so wrong?, the book shows how love relates to the self-awareness in spiritual development for each archetype. Whether describing an Innocent, a Magician, a Monarch, an Orphan, a Pilgrim, or a Warrior-Lover, the featured archetype profiles offer essential guidance about what level of awareness is currently being lived, how to transition to the next stage, and how love can be nurtured. Each stage of development is tied to the ancient wisdom of the Tarot--the visual images of which act as reminders as to what to expect on life's journey--supported by real-life and pop culture examples that provide more immediate accessibility.

As Lillian Faderman writes, there are "no constants with regard to lesbianism," except that lesbians prefer women. In this groundbreaking book, she reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, tracing the evolution of lesbian identity and subcultures from early networks to more recent diverse lifestyles. She draws from journals, unpublished manuscripts, songs, media accounts, novels, medical literature, pop culture artifacts, and oral histories by lesbians of all ages and backgrounds, uncovering a narrative of uncommon depth and originality.

The second installment in Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint challenges the traditional solemnity that characterizes nonfiction books of grief, loss, and sorrow. “Few readers will fail to be gripped by this tragically common story about death and what comes after for those left behind . . . A haunting and thought-provoking consideration of death and ‘how utterly it rips apart our lives.'” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review Planet Claire is the story of the untimely death of the author’s wife and his candid account of the following year of madness and grief. As his life unravels, Porter analyzes his sadness with growing interest. He talks to Claire as if to evoke a presence, to mark a space for memory. He reports on his daily walks and shares observations of life’s sadness, while reminiscing about various moments in their life together. Like Orpheus, the author searches for a lost love, and what he finds is not the dog of doom but flashes of an intimate symmetry that brighten the darkest places of sorrow. The second title from Ann Hood’s Gracie Belle imprint, Planet Claire takes readers on a journey of sorrow that recalls memorable works by C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed), Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking), and Julian Barnes (Levels of Life). Porter’s memoir, however, is also playful, quirky, and self-ironic in a way that challenges the genre’s traditional solemnity. Like the novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, this is an unpredictably funny account of heartbreak, as if to say there’s something about the magnitude of loss that troubles even earnestness.

Traditional Petrarchan and Neoplatonic paradigms of love started to show clear signs of inadequacy and exhaustion in the sixteenth century. How did the Spanish Golden Age recast worn out discourses of love and make them compelling again? This volume explores how Spanish letters recognized that old love paradigms, especially the crisis of the subject, presented an extraordinary opportunity for revising traditional literary strictures. As a result, during Spain’s nascent modernity, literature took up the challenge to expand existing forms of desire and subjectivity. A range of scholars show how canonical and non-canonical Golden Age writers like Miguel de Cervantes, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Francisco de la Torre y Sevil became equal agents of the sweeping ontological reconfiguration of the idea of eros that defined their culture. Such reconfiguration includes: the troubling displacement of "self" and "other" seen in sentimental genres like the pastoral or romance; the overlapping of emotions such as love and jealousy characteristic of the baroque lyric and dramatic production; and the conflation of axioms such as eros and eris prevalent in contemporaneous epic experiments. In uniting the findings of often surprising texts, the collection of essays in Goodbye Eros takes a pioneering look at how Golden Age moral, ideological, scientific, and literary discourses intersected to create fascinating re-elaborations of the trope of love.