For this companion to her New York Times best-selling collection A Family of Poems, Caroline Kennedy has hand-selected more than a hundred of her favorite poems that lend themselves to memorization. Some are joyful. Some are sad. Some are funny and lighthearted. Many offer layers of meaning that reveal themselves only after the poem has been studied so closely as to be learned by heart. In issuing the challenge to memorize great poetry, Caroline Kennedy invites us to a deeply enriching experience. For as she reminds us, “If we learn poems by heart, not only do we have their wisdom to draw on, we also gain confidence, knowledge and understanding that no one can take away.” Illustrated with gorgeous, original watercolor paintings by award-winning artist Jon J Muth , this is truly a book for all ages, and one that families will share again and again. Caroline’s thoughtful introductions shed light on the many ways we can appreciate poetry, and the special tradition of memorizing and reciting poetry that she celebrates within her own family.

In our world today, there is a yearning to connect to beauty; a rising tide of sensitivity and awareness of the immense difficulties we are facing; a need to find a sense of redemption. Poetry offers this. It opens the window to paradox, giving voice to both the souls grief and its longing for the ecstatic. Julie Taras poetry falls in the tradition of the mystical poets who, through the magic of words, open the eyeand the soulto the awareness of the infinite; of timelessness; of presence. To enter into Songs of Gaia is to enter into a world where the desert wind becomes a wild womans breath; where the rivers youve drunk deeply from become the blood of the Mothers veins, and where the sound of your beating heart becomes the rhythm of the very universe in which you live.

A Time to Grow, the third volume of the history of the Racine Dominican Sisters, tells the congregation's story from 1901 to 1964. After briefly recapturing the tumultuous development of the community while headed by Mother Hyacintha Oberbrunner from after the death of Mother Thomasina Ginker until the election of Sister Emily Acker in 1901, the book chronicles the period leading up to the Second Vatican Council and the changes already being set in motion before the congregational elections of 1964. Illustrations depict the lives of ordinary sisters as they struggled to observe the many regulations and customs handed down from a previous monastic era while carrying out their teaching ministry.

Mattie Stepanek began writing poetry and short stories at the age of three. Some of his poetry explores the uncensored reality of living with a rare form of muscular dystrophy and with the grief associated with the loss of his three siblings to the same life-threatening condition. But most of his poems proclaim the innocent hope. profund wisdom, and delighful humor of childhood.

A compilation of poems by Americans writing about American art in the twentieth century, including such writers as Nancy Willard, Jane Yolen, and X.J. Kennedy.