"Lindsay's poems open doors to other worlds and other ways of seeing."--New York Times

Presents a collection of surreal poems that blend science and art.

"Mort is a fireball. . . . Personal, political, and passionate, Mort's poetry will surely sustain many reading audiences. Highly recommended."—Library Journal "A one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight."—Midwest Book Review "Mort's style—tough and terse almost to the point of aphorism—recalls the great Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska."—Los Angeles Times Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic Belarusian poet, and Collected Body is her first collection composed in English. Whether writing about sex, relatives, violence, or fish markets as opera, Mort insists on vibrant, dark truths. "Death hands you every new day like a golden coin," she writes, then warns that as the bribe grows "it gets harder to turn down." "Preface" on a bare tree— a red beast, so still, it has become the tree. now it's the tree that prowls over the beast, a cautious beast itself. a stone thrown at its breast is so fast—the stone has become the beast. now it's the beast that throws itself like a stone, blood like a dog-rose tree on a windy day, and the moon is trying on your face for the annual masquerade of the dead. death decides to wait to hear more. so death mews: first—your story, then—me. Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. Her American debut, Factory of Tears, appeared in 2008 and she was featured on the cover of Poets & Writers. She has received many honors and awards, including a Civitella Raineri fellowship. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Read your way across North Carolina's Piedmont in the second of a series of regional guides that bring the state's rich literary history to life for travelers and residents. Eighteen tours direct readers to sites that more than two hundred Tar Heel authors have explored in their fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction. Along the way, excerpts chosen by author Georgann Eubanks illustrate a writer's connection to a specific place or reveal intriguing local culture--insights rarely found in travel guidebooks. Featured authors include O. Henry, Doris Betts, Alex Haley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, John Hart, Betty Smith, Edward R. Murrow, Patricia Cornwell, Carson McCullers, Maya Angelou, Lee Smith, Reynolds Price, and David Sedaris. Literary Trails is an exciting way to see anew the places that you already love and to discover new people and places you hadn't known about. The region's rich literary heritage will surprise and delight all readers.

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists No man of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from adhominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better. This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative. As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

In a world of fantasy, two enemies square off against one another: Grimlindus, the general, necromancer and suave lord of evil; and Ariadne, young refugee princess, fleeing the invasion of her homeland and the murder of her family. Grimlindus is armed with an evil Sword of Death and has an army of barbarians, knights, wizards, assassins and dragons. Ariadne only has a score of adventurers to assist her—a ragtag bunch of wizards, warriors and thieves—many with unclear intentions and dubious morals. With their help, she must escape the clutches of Grimlindus’s henchmen and the machinations of foreign lords who would use her for their designs, and must determine how to win back her father’s Kingdom. In the end, it will all fall to the roll of the knucklebones.

Winner: 2007 P. K. Page Founders' Award Winner: 2008 Great Canadian Literary Hunt Finalist: 2008 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place.