The Seven Pomegranate Seeds are seven contemporary monologues for female speakers, thematically linked and with powerful mythical origins. Loosely based on seven of Euripides’ female characters - Medea, Phedra, Demeter, Persephone, Hypsipyle, Creusa and Alcestis - these monologues explore classical mother and child stories in the context of modern Britain. With the tale of an abducted child echoing throughout and reflecting cases such as the Moors Murders, Madeline McCann and Louise Woodward, these individual monologues come together in a compelling conclusion. Originally commissioned by the Onassis Foundation and performed for their inaugural event in Oxford by Claire Higgins, this volume is published to coincide with Teevan’s professorial inaugural lecture on June 11 2014, at Birkbeck, University of London and is accompanied by his short introductory lecture.

Her light reached into the pits of darkness in which he dwelled with pleading souls, pouring through the fault in the ground like liquid gold. It was a lively aura that brought him to crawl straight from the depths of the Underworld. The moment he saw her smile that lit up Hell itself, he knew he forever wanted to be engulfed in its warmth. A warmth he hadn't felt in hundreds of years.The God of the Underworld had fallen for a damsel, one that was far too sweet for him. But that wouldn't stop him on his quest to take a bite of forbidden fruit, and neither would it Persephone, for she had plans for a taste as well.

Rita Dove (b. 1952) was elected Poet Laureate--the first ever African-American to hold the position--in 1993, in recognition of work that combines racially sensitive observation with searing and immediate personal experience. She is best known for her substantial body of poetry, although she has also been recognized for her many accomplishments in drama and fiction, written in both German and English. Crossing Color, written by a well-known Americanist in the European community, is the first full-length critical study offering a comprehensive biographic and literary portrait of Rita Dove and her work.

A Study Guide for Jill Bialosky's "Seven Seeds," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Pomegranate Seedsis the first collection of the oral tradition of Latin American Jews to be presented in English. These thirty-four tales span the 500 years of Jewish presence in Latin America and the Caribbean. The folktales and cultural oral narratives were often based on actual events, recorded not only from the Ashkenazi perspective but from the Sephardic and Oriental as well. Like dispersed pomegranate seeds, all the stories come from a common cluster, yet each is a separate kernel. The stories are short, between five and fifteen pages, and each is carefully annotated. In addition to gathering stories from eleven Latin American countries, the author found material in the United States and Israel. Regardless of their origin, several tales have to do with personal feelings, emotional insights, and interpretation of the protagonists, while others deal with happy or traumatic events that cannot be forgotten and dreams that have not been fulfilled. Not surprisingly, trauma and bigotry are common threads through some of the stories. These are tales, as Nadia Grosser Nagarajan says, "concealed by tropical greenery, encircled by vast jungles and flowing majestic rivers that echo many voices and reflect many views and visions."

An intensely powerful and moving memoir about genetics, mortality, family, femininity, and the author’s battle with cancer After the grief of losing her mother to cancer when Sarah Gabriel was a teenager, she had learned to appreciate "the charms of simple happiness." With a career as a journalist, a home in Oxford, England, a husband, and two young daughters, she was content. But then at age forty-four, she was diagnosed with breast cancer—the result of M18T, an inherited mutation on the BRCA1 gene that had taken the lives of her mother and countless female ancestors. Eating Pomegranates is Gabriel’s candid and incredibly intimate story of being forced to acknowledge that while you can try to overcome the loss of a parent, you can never escape your genetic legacy. Being diagnosed with the same disease that killed her mother compelled Gabriel to write this story. In her struggle for survival, she recounts the rigors of her treatments and considers the impact of a microscopic piece of DNA on generations of her family’s dynamics. She also revisits her past in an effort to reclaim her identity and learn more about the mother who disappeared too early from her life. Beautiful and brutal, Eating Pomegranates—like the myth of Persephone and Demeter, which inspires the title—is about mothers and motherless daughters. It is about a woman so afraid of abandoning her children that she is hardly able to look at them, and about the history of breast cancer itself, from early radical surgeries to contemporary medicine. Combining passion, humor, fierce intelligence, and clinical detail, Eating Pomegranates is an extraordinary book about an all-too-ordinary disease.