An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow.

Poetry. Norman Stock's direct expression of gut-level feelings, surreal fantasies, and riotous humor, invite the reader to experience poetry in a new, more immediate way. The boring posturing of academic poetry is stood on its head by these plain-spoken poems, from the much-anthologized What I Said, on 9/11, which one textbook study has described as offering a searing insight into the nature of humanity, to his comic send-ups of the literary world. As in his first book, the prize-winning Buying Breakfast for My Kamikaze Pilot, Stock once again lays bare the hypocrisies that surround us with his sardonic wit and commitment to the truth of what we actually feel as opposed to what we are often taught we are supposed to feel.

The collected essays of the cofounder of the New Narrative movement, on theory, identity, poetry, and muses from Kathy Acker to Georges Bataille. I read and wrote to invoke what seemed impossible—relation itself—in order to take part in a world that ceaselessly makes itself up, to “wake up” to the world, to recognize the world, to be convinced that the world exists, to take revenge on the world for not existing. —from Communal Nude Since cofounding San Francisco's influential New Narrative circle in 1979, Robert Glück has been one of America's finest prose stylists of innovative fiction, bending narrative into the service of autobiography, politics, and gay writing. This collection brings together for the first time Glück's nonfiction, a revelatory body of work that anchors his writing practice. Glück's essays explore the ways that storytelling and selfhood are mutually embedded cultural forms, cohering a fractured social reality where generating narrative means generating identity means generating community. “I'd laugh at (make art from) any version of self,” Glück writes, “I write about these forms—that are myself—to dispense with them, to demonstrate how they disintegrate before the world, the body.” For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing. Glück's essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, self-reflection, anecdote, escapade, and “metatext.” These texts span the author's career and his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary and philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O'Hara, Georges Bataille, and others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism, and public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück's essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice.

[I stole my fated mate's wallet!] "I want you all to search every nook and cranny of that city. Get me that girl alive. I want to torture her myself!" Jax roared in anger. How dare she? Does she think he's dumb not to know she was the one? She must be really dumb but he must confess. She was really a smart and scheming fellow to be able to pull that off. Aurora is a 23 years old werewolf from the Blood moon pack. She lives in the slums with her mother and younger sister. In order to provide for her poor mother and her sister's education she started doing petty crimes from the like of stealing from their neighbors and picking pockets. She was successfully going scot-free with her crimes till she got hooked when she stole the wallet of Jax, a ruthless and merciless Alpha who happens to be her pack's Alpha without her knowing. What happens when she had to finally return home to the pack due to her mother's sickness and met the man she stole his wallet as her fated Alpha?

Rowe has been writing all of her adult life- even through years of constant rejection from publishing houses. Between her tenacity and the encouragement of her family, her breakthrough finally came-- at the age of eighty! Here she shares her journey of attending myriad writers' conferences and honing her ability to see humor in everyday situations. Along the way Rowe delivers a hilarious array of stories that reflect her addiction to making people laugh. Even in her cancer support group, she manages to use her humor to affect others for the good. -- adapted from jacket