What started as a place to vent when my eyes couldn’t hold anymore tears, Petals and Ashes slowly turned into words of hope and life and love and laughter. It’s about going from a place of hurt and darkness to a world of light and love. Sometimes things get to the point where you just give up on everything. And you believe that nothing will ever change or get better. I thought that too. But I waited, and waited . . . until one day someone walked into my life and proved that no matter what, life is precious and very much worth living, even if you just can’t see it yet.

Two sisters take off on a wild road trip in this poignant tale for fans of Counting by 7s and Fish in a Tree After Mama Lacy’s death, Fella was forced to move in with her grandmother, Mrs. Madison. The move brought Fella all sorts of comforts she wasn't used to at home, but it also meant saying goodbye to her sister Zoey (a.k.a. Zany) and her other mother, Mama Shannon. Though Mama Shannon fought hard to keep Fella, it was no use. The marriage act is still a few years away and the courts thought Fella would be better off with a blood relation. Already heartbroken, Fella soon finds herself alone in Mrs. Madison's house, grieving both the death of her mother and the loss of her entire family. Then one night, Zany shows up at Mrs. Madison’s house determined to fulfill Mama Lacy’s dying wish: to have her ashes spread over the lawn of the last place they were all happy as a family. Of course, this means stealing Mama Lacy’s ashes and driving hundreds of miles in the middle of night to Asheville, North Carolina. Their adventure takes one disastrous turn after another, but their impulsive journey helps them rediscover the bonds that truly make them sisters. A heartrending story of family torn apart and put back together again, Ashes to Asheville is an important, timely tale.

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Poetry. Andrew Zawacki's third book explores the dynamics of one and of none: being and nothingness, binary code, virtual flowers in a bulletproof vase, she loves me she loves me not. Inflected by an ecopoetics that lets the electro in, PETALS OF ZERO PETALS OF ONE consists of three concatenated tracks, sequenced in a low-tech echo chamber. Winner of the 1913 Prize, Georgia has been praised by Cole Swensen as a vibrant disaster that keeps us feeling falling, while Peter Gizzi calls it a high velocity tour-de-force. The central series, Arrow's shadow is a fractured ars poetica and an elegiac encounter with landscape and syllable, with pixelated forms and light. Storm, lustral choreographs an epileptic last dance along the ditch waters and wanderlust of the Dasein. This volume affirms Susan Howe's claim that Zawacki combines the disciplined perception of a naturalist with the inspired perception of a poet.

This book introduces literary métissage as a way to research, teach, and live ethically «with all our relations» in our precarious times. The authors theorize and perform literary métissage through the praxis of life writing, braiding their autobiographical texts, in various (mixed) genres, into seven themes. Life Writing and Literary Métissage as an Ethos for Our Times explores this writing praxis, with its more inclusive and generative notions of knowledge and knowledge practices, as a tool for creating more just societies and schools.

As the Plague takes hold of seventeenth-century London and people flee the city, Hannah and her sister Sarah try to maintain Sarah's candy shop even with the possibility of their own demise growing ever closer.