Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. Finalist for 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award. 10th anniversary edition of Shane McCrae's groundbreaking first collection of poetry, MULE, first published in 2011. With new Poems by the author and an introduction by Victoria Chang. 'Imagine // welcoming the wound, ' McCrae writes in his frontispiece poem, 'The Cardinal Is The Marriage Bird.' McCrae not only acquiesces to the wound in Mule, but he revises the wound through language, and in the process, we are in the midst of beauty. I hope that a new generation of readers, through this tenth anniversary edition, will be able to experience the skillful contradictions within McCrae's language, and be opened up and broken in the same way that I was when I first read this stunning and singular book.--Victoria Chang MULE is a book both haunted and haunting--possessed by sound and its tremendous momentum, that somehow-suspended momentum, hypnotic in its rhythms and compelling in its headlong fall into the truth of the heart.--Cole Swensen Shane McCrae admits us to the marriage of impediments... in a country that too often insists on fracture over union.--Rachel Loden What a joy now to discover a voice such as Shane McCrae's, who... finds his new music, and compels us with its outbursts and heartbreak and yells and stuttering of joy and its sudden clarity of perception that is like no other. Shane McCrae is a master.--Ilya Kaminsky Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book... McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song.--Katie Ford Poetry.

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Poetry. African American Studies. MULE is highly lyrical, obsessively incantatory, audaciously formal, and actually a very personal, very autobiographical book. In it, the author addresses his at the time failing second marriage (which he is no longer in), his son's autism, his own racial identity, and some of his beliefs about God. "Some books come down like gods dying to transform us out of our empty, shattered lives. MULE is such a book. Never shying away from sudden confusions of pain and beauty, Shane McCrae's questions are not why so much pain? why so much beauty? but, instead, how can they remake us? McCrae's is a living, breathing poetry made of wisdom and wrenching song." Katie Ford"

Literary Nonfiction. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2016 Essay Collection Competition. "Growing up queer in Florida in the 1980s, James Allen Hall's life has taken him to places that high culture rarely treads. Losing their once-thriving family business in the pre-crash 2000s, his broke and unstable parents move into a two-bedroom student apartment shared previously with just his brother. His mother routinely attempts or threatens suicide, his father is depressed. In these essays, Hall lives alongside, and empathically lives through, his family's meth addiction, mental illnesses, and incarcerations, and considers his own penchants for less than happy, equal sex with an agility, depth, and lightness that is blissfully inconclusive. I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL is a tragic, funny, graceful book." --Chris Kraus "The essays collected in I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL are indeed harrowing--but more powerfully, they reveal a sensibility driven to make something beautiful and worthy of the raw and the rough. Hall's work lays bare all manner of vulnerability, not to confess or shock, but to reckon into language the nearly unsayable. And who exactly is at the center of this drive toward the light? A witness, an unrelenting seeker, a survivor, someone who's earned the right to judge but who withholds that too-easy gesture in favor of a clearer sight and the hard won belief that while we are bound together by so many complex tethers, including cruelty, we are especially linked by compassion, a force abundantly evident in this moving collection." --Lia Purpura "'What I am should be extinguished, ' writes James Allen Hall about his queerness, which despite a journey through youth troubled with violence and homophobia, manages to exist and persist. Yet the personal essays in I LIKED YOU BETTER BEFORE I KNEW YOU SO WELL are more than expressions of pain, they are testaments to perseverance shaped by the acceptance of a flawed self, love for a complicated family and an unflappable wit. Thank you, James, for this extraordinary book so full of honest and compelling moments that will resonate with the aching heart inside each of us."--Rigoberto Gonzalez

The star of children's TV returns to the BBC in an animation in September 2005. This annual is full of activities, puzzles, stories, drawing and colouring.

Betty Tucker came of age in Belle Glade, Florida, infamous for its poverty and violence (e.g., see the Wikipedia entry and the 2006 documentary One Percent). Her childhood was one of debilitating poverty, borne of racism: exploitive migrant labor, multiple rapes and other abuse, chronic illness among her family and acquaintances ... the list is long and bitter. Betty survived not only by sheer hard work but also by nurturing a nascent belief that she deserved better. She moved to California, earned her college degree, and raised a family. Then, in 1997, she began a long and eventually successful search for the twin girls she had given up for adoption thirty years earlier. Fear, insecurity, sexual abuse, want, neglect: This memoir will look beyond the description of these difficulties in the author's life to examine how they stifled her ability to shape her own life, how she acquired the tools she needed to take more control of her life, and what impact her choices, both intentional and unintentional, had on her life and those of her children.