"Ascension / is the work of a lifetime on one's knees," writes Michele Lesko. The women in her poems kneel for loveless sex, unrelenting housework, and prayer to a tortured god. Emotionally intense and bracingly honest, a jolt of lemon in the sea of sweetness that is much contemporary poetry. Julie Kane, the 2011-2013 Louisiana Poet Laureate, is Professor of English Emeritus at Northwestern State University and is the author of six volumes of poetry. To read the poems in Lesko's Kneeling Under the Lemon Tree, is to live by both their tart and promise. Nothing and no one is to be turned from--not the priest, not the parents, not lovers, professors, or the poet herself. The ache and yearning in the sharp lines are balanced by a sweet the poet insists upon, but still refuses (at first) in total fullness. You walk a knife's edge of exquisitely crafted line-breaks, which in their patience and balance hold the understanding of several opposing truths at once. Even silence works overtime, refuses to let you take it for granted, as it writes itself large in these poems' tight blooms of music. This collection of poems is record and mirror, and in those hustles, provides us with a powerful witness and a catalog of questions to challenge the power we wield and the power to which we're subject. This is a powerful book. It won't let you off easy, and it won't let you down. Roger Bonair-Agard, a Cave Canem fellow and National Poetry Slam champion, is the author of three volumes of poetry and the co-founder of louderARTS Project. He teaches writing at the Free Write Arts & Literacy Program in Chicago. There is such tenderness here: "Two pale breasts softly sit / atop twelve bones aligned / to protect a single heart" and "Maybe I will grow to love this sorrow." Lesko has conjured a strong, steady voice that carries her speaker from childhood to motherhood, from religion to spirituality, in intimate, vulnerable narratives that both lighten the spirit and break the heart of the reader. Here is not brokenness or resolution; what's found here is recognition and purpose. Reneé Ashley is the author of six volumes of poetry, two chapbooks, and the novel, Someplace Like This. Part of Ashley's poem, "First Book of the Moon," appears in the permanent installation by artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station Terminal.

Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion. Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French "autofiction" of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers. Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman. From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.

Contains monthly column of the Sequoya League.

Includes reports, etc., of the Southwest Society of the Archaeological Institutes of America.

The bed, dressed in hand sewn quilt or threadbare blanket, may in and of itself be memorable, but it is what happens in the bed the sex and lovemaking, the dreams, the reading, the nightmares, the rest, giving birth and dying which give bed special meaning. Whether a bed is shared with a book, a child, a pet or a partner, whether lovers lie in ecstasy or indifference, whether bed relates to intimacy or betrayal, it is memories and recollections of bed, in whatever form, which have triggered the writing of these thirty stories by women from southern Africa. Well known writers Joanne Fedler, Sarah Lotz, Arja Salafranca, Rosemund Handler and Liesl Jobson will delight, but you will discover here new writers from Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Namibia and Zambia, each with a unique voice as they cast light on the intimate lives of women living in this part of the world and the possibilities that are both available to and denied them. The BED BOOK of short stories some quirky and tender, others traumatic or macabre is the perfect companion to take to bed with you, to keep you reading long into the night.

This book is one man's journey through life, from a time long ago, to a now much different future. There are a few sad times but through the pages laughter is never far away. Terry White was born and has lived most of his life in Scarborough, although he spent ten years working and living in Gibraltar. Married with two children and three grandchildren, Terry spent all his working life in the building trade. After a tragic house fire affected Terry he turned to poetry. Over the last twenty five years he has had numerous poems published in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies of poetry, all to critical acclaim. He has recited his poems on radio and many appear in his earlier book, ?Where the Reflecting River Flows?. Terry now concentrates on creative writing.