Emerging from society's most hidden and reviled structures is a poetry of majestic, riveting intensity.

Effective self-promotion builds reputations and credibility. It sets the best firms apart, distinguishing their clients and prospects, and guaranteeing sales. Successful sales result from effective successful self-promotion and the The Big Book of Self Promotion is an extraordinary resource featuring work from top designers around the globe. It offers hundreds of ideas, pages of inspiration, and loads of advice for professional graphic designers and students alike. This book provides ideas on corporate and product literature, annual reports and direct marketing, and new media, providing a wellspring of ideas for designers creating client brochures. It offers recommendations for choosing type, layout, photo treatments, and much more.

“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence.”—The New Yorker Inspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons—where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a “factotum” for a portrait photographer—One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and “counts” of things—from baby’s teeth to chigger bites: Count your folding money Count the times you said you wouldn’t go back Count your debts Count the roaches when the light comes on Count your kids after the housefire One Big Self—originally published as a large-format limited edition that featured photographs and text—was selected by The New York Times and The Village Voice as a notable book of the year. This edition features the poem exclusively. C.D. Wright is the author of ten books of poetry, including several collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. She is a professor at Brown University.

In 1998 photographer Deborah Luster and poet C.D. Wright set out to produce a record of Louisiana's prison population through image and text. One Big Self is a document to ward off forgetting, an opportunity for those inmates to present themselves as they would be seen, bringing what they own or borrow or use: work tools, objects of their making, messages of their choosing, their bodies, themselves. The photographer has been commissioned, in a sense, by the inmates to make portraits for their loved ones--trying to ensure a balance between photograph and subject, to connect the viewer, whether mother, child, friend, or stranger, to the prisoner. The view is inherently personal. Luster's finished portraits are printed on metal in the manner of tintypes, durable snapshot mementos popularized during the 1860s and '70s. The persistent gaze of both inmate and documentarian are what we see. The text testifies to what is in and out of view. Luster and Wright have set out to explore the dimensions of prisoners' lives beyond the crimes that have come to define them. They suggest that our punitive models reflect who we are just as much as our reward systems do. Everyone somehow is implicated.

Giving true love a spin . . . Michelin Moses is a country music star on the rise. With a hit single under his Texas-sized belt buckle and a sold-out concert tour underway, his childhood dreams of making it big are finally coming true. But there’s one thing missing—a promise to his dying mother that he’d find it—him—when the time was right. With a little luck, he won’t have to wait too long . . . Lucky Ramirez is a hunky boy toy who dances at The Broom Closet, one of West Hollywood’s hottest gay bars. He loves what he does, and he’s good at it—almost as good as he is at playing dumb when he spots Michelin Moses at the bar. What happens next is off the charts—and keeps Michelin coming back for more. He’s just not sure it’s the right move for his career. But if Lucky gets his way, Michelin will get Lucky—and no matter how the media spins it, neither of them will be faking it . . . Praise for the Portland Heat series “Tremendously charming and sexy.”—RT Book Reviews on Served Hot “A really enjoyable story.”—Joyfully Jay on Baked Fresh “Sometimes an author just gets everything right...Absolutely perfect.”—Guilty Pleasures Book Reviews on Delivered Fast

Though it is simple and obvious, you may not understand the incredible importance of the way of nothing. When you do see the way, you will wonder, "Can it really be this easy and simple?" And seeing that there was never anything in the way of freedom can almost be embarrassing. "How could I have never seen it?" you’ll ask. The Way of Nothing: Nothing in the Way explores the obstacles that stop you from reaching your highest desires: enlightenment, eternal peace, or simply ordinary contentment. These obstacles are nothing more than concepts you have that seem real, yet they vanish with insight into the way. It is a wonderful surprise to discover that there has always been nothing in the way of what you want. Best of all, there is really nothing to it! ,