Prim, persnickety ElizabethAnn must restore a delicate balance of technology and magic to the mysterious land of Bumblegreen, all despite greedy watchmakers, toxic babies, and one particularly obnoxious Lothario. This imaginative fantasy novel, with its beautiful pen-and-ink cover and illustrations, is a perfect gift for any artist or bibliophile.

"How I would like to catch the world / at pure idea," writes Jorie Graham, for whom a bird may be an alphabet, and flight an arc. Whatever the occasion--and her work offers a rich profusion of them--the poems reach to where possession is not within us, where new names are needed and meaning enlarged. Hence, what she sees reminds her of what is missing, and what she knows suggests what she cannot. From any event, she arcs bravely into the farthest reaches of mind. Fast readers will have trouble, but so what. To the good reader afraid of complexity, I would offer the clear trust that must bond us to such signal poems as (simply to cite three appearing in a row) "Mother's Sewing Box," "For My Father Looking for My Uncle," and "The Chicory Comes Out Late August in Umbria." Finally, the poet's words again: ". . . you get / just what you want" and (just before that), "Just as / from time to time / we need to seize again / the whole language / in search of / better desires."--Marvin Bell

Celebrating mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, grandmothers and grandchildren, Motherhood is a glorious, wonderfully intimate tribute to the first love in every reader’s life. From tenth-century Japan’s Izumi Shikibu, colonial America’s Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel’s Yehuda Amichai, Ireland’s Paul Muldoon, and Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship. Among the more than seventy poets in this anthology, Audre Lorde recalls “How the days went / While you were blooming within me”; Jorie Graham muses on her mother’s sewing box; Allen Ginsberg says goodbye in “Kaddish”; and Langston Hughes invokes a mother’s empowering example: “Don’t you fall now— / For I’se still goin’, honey, / I’se still climbin’, / And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” From Emily Brontë’s “Upon Her Soothing Breast” and Seamus Heaney’s “Mother of the Groom” to Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria,” the more than one hundred poems collected here enshrine the miracle of motherhood and the richness of feeling and experience it inspires.

"'What does one learn by taking a journey, any journey?' Helen Bevington asks. 'I've taken a shaky trip through a decade (to Russia, to the mailbox, to bed) to the end of the 1970s, about which uncomplimentary and increasingly anxious remarks were made by us all--you, me, and the media.' This is a book of journeys, to places--Russia, Hawaii, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, the South Seas, the Rhine, Australia, New Zealand, New Mexico--and to the classroom at Duke University where she was Professor of English until her retirement in 1976. Since everything is a journey, the book is concerned with travel of all kinds, in books, in memories, in people living and dead, a lighthearted search for Eden on this planet but a more serious search for survival in the troubled decade of the 1970s"--Publisher.

"These vivid New Hampshire farm sketches from Hall's well-spent youth--all written when he was full-grown--are as much attuned to the supple and enticing utilities of language as they are grounded in a vanished time which may, at a glimpse, seem simple, but were complex and rich and not simple at all."--Richard Ford This is a collection of story-essays diverse in subject but united by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things: a childhood, perhaps a culture. In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house that held a box of string too short to be saved.

Are you buried in scraps—big pieces, small pieces, hunks, chunks, strips, and parts? Bonnie K. Hunter fans will love her newest book of playful string-quilt projects! Sew a dozen vibrant quilt patterns using the small leftovers from other projects that seem too tiny to save, yet too big to toss. Learn Bonnie’s basics for foundation piecing narrow fabric pieces 3/4” to 2” wide, turning them into dazzling scrappy blocks and one-of-a-kind quilts. Have a string piecing party with a best-selling author, the great Bonnie K. Hunter Love your leftovers! Become a scrap quilt addict, sewing fabric strings and crumbs into brand new blocks Hunter fans will love this offering of twelve “use it all” patterns in her signature style