Acetylene Torch Songs is a guidebook for writers who want their honesty, social engagement, and intimacy to reach beyond the page and transform the lives of readers with searing, indelible, and unquenchable words.

When recently widowed Kay Gates moves to Sydenham, Ontario to start a new chapter in her life, she is hoping for some peace after a difficult year. However, what she finds instead is anything but idyllic. Shortly after she realizes her home is haunted by a ghost with an agenda, the house across the road is destroyed by arson, and Kay stumbles upon a murder scene next door. Fortunately, she doesn’t have to go through all of this alone. Her best friend Jules moves in after splitting with her wife, and Jo, a local baker and volunteer firefighter, quickly becomes her roomie’s plus one. Her weeks fill up with visits from her disabled adult son, Ben, and the handsome Detective Jack Murphy suddenly seems to be around an awful lot. With Kay’s supernatural encounters increasing and her own personal safety threatened, she struggles to make sense of seemingly unconnected events. And while the torch songs of potential love keep getting louder, Kay begins to realize that she needs to examine the past to make sense of the present because if she doesn’t figure it all out fast, she might be the next one burned.

These fine poems are connected byÑand evokeÑthe music of lost homelands. Paegle, the daughter of immigrants from Argentina and Latvia, takes us through the tumult of displacement and migration with a strong sense for the folk songs and tango music of her youth. Against this musical backdrop, she invests the bandone—n, an accordion-like instrument brought to Argentina in the late nineteenth century, with a special significance. Her poetic account of the instrument yields this striking tribute, which testifies to the passion of the collection: Òwhen mission music spilled, / five octaves went new-world wild.Ó The poems in the first section, torch songs, hover near a heartbreaking lyricism as they reckon with political histories, landscapes, and loss. As she writes in this section, there is truly Ònothing in this life like being blind in Granada.Ó The sonnet crown that comprises the next section, tango liso, plots a history of cultural inheritance and renewal, weaving back and forth in time and spanning Argentina, Spain, and the United States. Here the reader encounters Eva Per—n alongside Katharine of Aragon and Billie Holiday. The final section, choir, commemorates sites of pilgrimage in Latvia, West Germany, and Spain, among other places. In this extended contemplation of cathedral spaces, Paegle interrogates the boundary between the sacred and the secular, silence and song. What emerges from this diverse collection is a sensual and allusive space where music and memory coincide.

"In this innovative book, Stacy Holman Jones presents torch singing as a much more complicated phenomenon than the familiar trope of a woman lamenting her victimhood. With an ethnographer's eye, she observes the bluesy torch singers, asking if they are possibly performing critiques of the very lyrics they are singing. From this perspective, we see the singer giving expression not only to desire but also to an incipient determination to resist and change. Holman Jones also reveals points of contact in the opposition between spectators and performers, emotion and intellect, and love and power. Instead of interpreting the expression of love as a woman's violent mistake - as willing deception and passive fate - Holman Jones allows us to hear an active search for hope."--BOOK JACKET.

See:

In these stories inspired by the hit animated TV series Young Justice, Superboy, Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Miss Martian, and Artemis make their way to Atlantis to foil Ocean-Master’s plan to purify the underwater city. Then, the team must fight off the menace known as Kobra, as well as defeat an army of warrior gorillas in the dangerous Gorilla City! Plus, the Young Justice team adds to its ranks in an effort to battle the impending invasion by the Collector of Worlds, and one of the DC Universe’s favorite villains, Brainiac! Collects Young Justice #14-25.