A masterful collection of poems rooted in K’iche’ Maya culture illustrating all the ways meaning manifests within our world, and how best to behold it. “My language was born among trees, / it holds the taste of earth; / my ancestors’ tongue is my home.” So writes Humberto Ak’abal, a K’iche’ Maya poet born in Momostenango, in the western highlands of Guatemala. A legacy of land and language courses through the pages of this spirited collection, offering an expansive take on this internationally renowned poet’s work. Written originally in the Indigenous K’iche’ language and translated from the Spanish by acclaimed poet Michael Bazzett, these poems blossom from the landscape that raised Ak’abal—mountains covered in cloud forest, deep ravines, terraced fields of maize. His unpretentious verse models a contraconquista—counter-conquest—perspective, one that resists the impulse to impose meaning on the world and encourages us to receive it instead. “In church,” he writes, “the only prayer you hear / comes from the trees / they turned into pews.” Every living thing has its song, these poems suggest. We need only listen for it. Attuned, uncompromising, Ak’abal teaches readers to recognize grace in every earthly observation—in the wind, carrying a forgotten name. In the roots, whose floral messengers “tell us / what earth is like / on the inside.” Even in the birds, who “sing in mid-flight / and shit while flying.” At turns playful and pointed, this prescient entry in the Seedbank series is a transcendent celebration of both K’iche’ indigeneity and Ak’abal’s lifetime of work.

When Caroline and her husband begin working with civil war refugees in South Sudan and Kenya, they'll discover the deep complexities of American interference abroad, the consequences of striving for perfection in an imperfect world, and above all--the extraordinary grace to be found in the unlikeliest of places.

This book focuses on today’s education relative to its effectiveness for preparing students for the future. The matter of purposes for education today remains controversial in that future success looms important by a considerable portion of the citizenry while preparing for success in the future is of great importance for other individuals and groups. The book considers both sides of the purpose question. Predicting the needs for the future is a difficult matter at best.

Originally published in 1969, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories remains among the most memorable creations of an unforgettable age. Irrepressibly experimental in both content and form, these anti-fictions set out to rescue experience from its containment within artistic convention and bourgeois morality. Equal parts high modernist aesthete and borscht belt comedian, Sukenick joins avant-garde art with street slang and cartoons, expressing his generation's anxieties by simultaneously mocking and validating them. These are original works by a writer who will try absolutely anything.

Hello, my name is Philip R. Richards, the author of this book. I suppose you want to know something about the word smith that created these writings. Oh, this is my friend Harry pictured with me. He has passed now, but he will always be in our hearts. I was born in 1959, I enjoy photography and the natural world. I married a wonderful woman in 1983 and had two beautiful daughters, Hannah and Allison. I am blessed with a wonderful Granddaughter named Lillian Jade. We live in the Michigan, the winter wonderland. It is a beautiful state with much to explore. I discovered that I really enjoyed writing. Mostly I feel a need to write, to express how I view different aspects of life and to try to relate to other people with similar visions and view points. Writing is a great way to express your feelings and create an avenue between you and those around you. I hope you can relate to what I have written in this book, maybe enough to get Book II, when I get around to it.

Many philosophy majors are shocked by the gap between the relative ease of lower-level philosophy courses and the difficulty of upper-division courses. This book serves as a necessary bridge to upper-level study in philosophy by offering rigorous but concise and accessible accounts of basic concepts and distinctions that are used throughout the discipline. It serves as a valuable advanced introduction to any undergraduate who is moving into upper-level courses in philosophy. While lower-level introductions to philosophy usually deal with popular topics accessible to the general student (such as contemporary moral issues, free will, and personal identity) in a piecemeal fashion, The Philosophy Major’s Introduction to Philosophy offers coverage of important general philosophical concepts, tools, and devices that may be used for a long time to come in various philosophical areas. The volume is helpfully divided between a focus on the relation between language and the world in the first three chapters and coverage of mental content in the final two chapters, but builds a coherent narrative from start to finish. It also provides ample study questions and helpful signposts throughout, making it a must-have for any student attempting to engage fully with the problems and arguments in philosophy. Key Features Integrates topics from various areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophical logic Provides descriptions of logico-mathematical tools necessary for philosophical studies, such as propositional logic, predicate logic, modal logic, set theory, mereology, and mathematical functions Makes connections with modern philosophy, including discussions of Descartes’s skepticism and dualism, Locke’s theory of personal identity, Hume’s theory of causation, and Kant’s synthetic a priori Includes well-known entertaining puzzles and thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus, the Statue and the Clay, a Brain in a Vat, and Twin Earth Lists helpful Exercise Questions and Discussion Questions at the end of each chapter and answers selected questions at the back of the book