I really never thought much about becoming a poet. My writing poetry was a way of expressing my innermost feelings about things that affected my life or that I enjoyed or cared about. I think that you will sense a growing mataurity in my writing as you read more of my poems. My poems touch on a number of subjects such as life, death, nature, love of family, and love of God while others reflect on just ordinary things that each of us deal with in our lives. I hope that reading these poems causes each of us to think more deeply about who we are and who we want to become. I hope some of them make us laugh at ourselves while others give us a different perspective about life. I feel that God meant for this gift of poetry to be shared with others. That is why it is being published. Enjoy the journey. Wayne Hampton

Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga. With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, shojo manga are thoroughly marked by gender—as indeed are almost all manga titles, magazines, and publishing divisions. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on the production of shojo manga, Prough analyzes shojo manga texts and their magazine contexts to explain their distinctive appeal, probe the gendered dynamics inherent in their creation, and demonstrate the feedback system that links producers and consumers in a continuous cycle of "affective labor." Each chapter focuses on one facet of shojo manga production (stories, format, personnel, industry dynamics), providing engaging insights into this popular medium. Tacking between story development, interactive magazine features, and relationships between male editors and female artists, Prough examines the concrete ways in which shojo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Straight from the Heart thus weaves together issues of production and consumption, human relations, and gender to explain the unique world of shojo manga and to interpret its dramatic cultural and economic success on a national—and increasingly global—scale.

A collection of short stories, essays and poems in which the author expresses common threads of humanity found in everyday life. His appreciation for the natural world and its beauty is evident in his pure and uncomplicated syntax, his keen observation, and his sincere assertions that indeed, come "straight from the heart".

From America's beloved storyteller, Barbara Delinsky, comes Straight from the Heart, a classic novel of one lovesick doctor and the woman who makes his heart ache with desire... As the head of cardiology at New Haven Medical Center, Dr. Robert McCrae knows a lot about the human heart. But it's not until he spots Heather Cole's beautiful face at one of his lectures that he realizes how much more he needs to learn. From the moment he sees her, his heart skips a beat—metaphorically speaking—and his pulse rate soars. It turns out that Heather is a local hand-bag designer who's not just playing doctor; she's putting her heart on the line. Rob may be the only one who can help. But first she'll have to trust him—and take a risk on falling in love...

Former Mr. Universe Bob Paris and topflight model Rod Jackson tell how their marriage catapulted them from physique icons to international spokesmen for gay rights.

This collection of talks was originally given for the benefit of a lay disciple who had come to Ajaan Mahā Boowa’s monastery to receive his guidance as she faced her approaching death from bone marrow cancer. These talks offer important lessons about how to learn from pain, illness and death, by seeing through to their ultimate nature and detaching the mind from the suffering associated with them.