Louis Brawley met UG Krishnamurti in 2002 and spent the following five years travelling with him in the USA, India and Europe keeping a record of this remarkable non-teacher and documenting his own inner struggles as his ideas about life, love and Enlightenment were constantly tossed around and demolished. Louis fell into the role of foil and sidekick to UG’s bizarre interactions with his friends and audience and, as UG’s health deteriorated, he became his informal caregiver. Louis Brawley doesn’t use honeyed platitudes to tell the story of a sage and his devoted follower; instead he tells an often unflattering story of his own struggles and shortcomings and the dynamic uncertainties of life with a man who “tore apart everything human beings have built up inside and out for centuries.” Goner will teach you the meaning of the phrase “paradoxical truth”. UG Krishnamurti gave up everything for truth, but delighted in ridiculous fabrications; he was a teacher who refused to teach, a man who mocked do-gooders but was deeply kind; he was chaste but foul mouthed, he was a man who decried the supernatural … yet there were strange coincidences around him. “…the way he lived, his living quarters and his mode of expression were one continuous movement, a three dimensional, living book of teaching. If you were observant, you could learn from him on contact with no need for explanation.”

Goner follows the lives of four sisters from a progressive household in the Deep South. The narrative begins with their northern mother's arrival in a Louisiana army town as a young newspaper reporter in 1943 and her hasty, unconsidered, marriage to a genteel older man. It follows the naive couple from their disastrous wedding night, to the birth of their first daughter on the same day their house is reclaimed by a returning G.I. The Sobrals migrate from Baton Rouge, to an isolated bayou plantation, and then on to a cotton town caught in the post war boom. Just before their fourth daughter is born, the Sobrals settle in BelleBend, a sleepy little town on the Mississippi River The Sobral sisters grow up listening to the haunting calls of riverboats and the rumbling of sugar cane trucks down the River Road; they attend BelleBend's black church, and endlessly speculate about the relationship between their beautiful, remote mother and kindly absent-minded father. The story follows the girls' childhood adventures--some hilarious and some breathtakingly dangerous--in a time and a place where adults pay little attention to the wanderings of children. Together, the Sobral daughters find Elvis, teen love, and come of age during the early civil rights movement. In their jasmine-scented isolation, the four sisters form a profound and enduring bond. Kennedy's assassination transforms their family in unforeseen ways. In 1980 the four sisters return to their River Road house for their heartbroken father¿s deathwatch. Their beloved and enigmatic mother has recently died. On their last night together, one of the sisters uncovers a devastating secret. Goner examines the ties between real and imagined lives, between character and narrator, and the entwined ways that a family survives by creating its own myth.

An anthology of brand-new poems inspired by Taylor Swift songs, from a powerhouse group of contemporary poets, including Kate Baer, Maggie Smith, and Joy Harjo. Let the decoding begin! With a record-breaking four Grammy awards for Album of the Year, Taylor Swift stands alone in the world of pop music. One of the most talented lyricists of all time, her music captivates millions of fans throughout the globe with the narrative depth and emotional resonance of her songwriting. In Invisible Strings, poet, professor, and dedicated Swiftie Kristie Frederick Daugherty has brought together 113 contemporary poets, each contributing an original poem that responds to a specific Taylor Swift song. In a spirit of celebration and collaboration, poets have taken a cue from Swift’s love of dropping clues and puzzles for her fandom to decode, as each poem alludes to a song without using direct lyrics. Swifties will enjoy closely reading each of the poems to discover which song each poet responded to; each poem responds to only one song. The collection showcases a diverse and accomplished array of writers including the 23rd US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, Pulitzer Prize winners Diane Seuss, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Rae Armantrout, Paul Muldoon, and Gregory Pardlo, National Book Critics Circle Award winners Mary Jo Bang and Laura Kasischke, and bestselling poets Maggie Smith, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kate Baer, amanda lovelace, Tyler Knott Gregson, and Jane Hirshfield. Swifties will experience the profundity and nuance of Swift’s lyrics through these poems, while having fun matching the poems to songs from all of her eras—vault tracks included! For poetry lovers, this one-of-a-kind anthology is an unparalleled collection of new work from today’s most lauded and revered poets.

Salms navigates the ancient, vexed lyric landscape of the biblical psalm, where gratitude is arrived at through complaint and yearning is smuggled in alongside tribute. Formally restless and diverse, Aaron McCollough’s style moves from flinty Anglo-Norman terseness through folktale to long-lined, journal-like confessional. The poems’ sounds and forms bind to the divine histories of the Western lyric tradition at points of fragility and potential disintegration.