One of my dreams as always been to become a famous author because people would read my stuff and maybe the world would get better. There's an evolution to my poetry too from when I was younger and through my life and relationships my words have changed so much. Poetry is like a clay sculpture. You write something that sounds decent but then you can add more to it and change things a little and come up with something better and then you put your poem in the kiln and it sticks. And that's just like life. This book is literally my life and opinions brought forward via intense self-reflection, lessons in the fundamentals of poetry, and the pursuit towards a world that is brave enough to feel deeply again, and plenty of frustrated purposeful prose. My poetry is explicit. I cannot change that because I don't believe poetry should be censored. Thus I recommend it not be for the faint of heart, or faint of minds.

How would you live the last year of your life if you knew the exact date of your death? Especially if you were relatively young, healthy, and the premonition made no sense? This is the question Sebastian asks himself every day after receiving a mysterious note that reads, “You only have one more year to live.” The entire year Dr Sebastian Luis Perez-Fuertes struggles with the daily receipt of the mysterious missives that remind him of the day he will supposedly die, unleashing a catharsis of enigma, love, and Hispanic American culture, while navigating the confines of his life in Puerto Rico, bathed in the seas of magic realism. In "Catharsis", Garcia Cortes extends an invisible contract acquainting us with a fascinating character whose only desire is to continue existing despite a future overshadowed by a distressing prognosis.

Grief can do terrible things to us. It can hold us still in time and skew our perspective. That is the case with William Maldonado, who grieves the loss of his father as a child to war; the loss of his mother as a young adult to an illness; the loss of an opportunity to pursue a doctoral degree, and the loss of his professional reputation to an accusation of committing insurance fraud. Subterranean sorrow leads Maldonado to make wrong-minded decisions that eventually lead him to prison and then to a half-way-house. One day, as he tries to understand his grief, he blames the world, and, in particular, a former business partner. Full of rage, he returns to the city where he experienced his deepest wounds. Upon his return, he discovers that his former business partner, now a Pentecostal minister, emerged unscathed from the insurance fraud scandal that sent him fleeing for a decade. That discovery thrusts Maldonado on a path of revenge and into the roiling world of church politics, where he joins a secession group that wants to fire his former partner. It takes the whims of fate and new friendships for Maldonado to experience clarity of purpose.

In Untamed and Unabashed, Regina Barreca, noted authority on women and humor, examines the use of humor in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, and Fay Weldon. She analyzes the ways that each writer uses comedic devices, especially those involving language itself, and discusses the gendered basis of their humor, providing a provocative feminist perspective on gender and comedy. Each of the essays argues that conservative critics have misread and misunderstood the importance of humor in the works of these women authors, and that women's humor serves to explode conventions oppressive to women and to offer women readers a critique of, and an alternative perspective on, the dominant cultural ideologies that contain and oppress them. The book concludes that these authors strategically deployed humor, coded in forms that women readers-but not men readers-would recognize and understand, as a means of educating and empowering those women readers. Barreca asserts that much of women's comic play has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation, allowing women to gain perspective by ridiculing the implicit insanities of a patriarchal culture. Using detailed persuasive new readings of various works of each of her chosen authors, she shows how the straightjacket of conventional femininity is challenged, confronted, and finally, thrown off. This volume demonstrates that comedy can effectively channel anger and rebellion by first making them appear to be acceptable and temporary phenomena, and then by harnessing the released energies, rather than dispersing them. This kind of comedy, which is at the heart of Untamed and Unabashed, terrifies those who hold order dear. It should.

Self-made miss Aurora Calhoun has always possessed an uncommon amount of sense when it comes to men. However, within minutes of colliding with Lord Ramsden's carriage, she finds herself kissing the incorrigible rogue! Crispin Ramsden feels restrained by the shackles of his unwanted inheritance. Especially when he is faced with a woman whose impetuous nature ignites a passion that is as uncontrollable as it is scandalous! Society is rocked by this outrageous couple. Can these two wild hearts find a place to belong?

I have for long yearned to see my poems published someday. My deep and long romance with poetry has only been made more beautiful when the sudden epiphanic moments of poetic justice, be it in great imaginations of creative efforts or in real life hit me, in the process leaving me awed and confounded. And I have tried little and at times quite sincerely to capture such beautiful moments in my words. So, to let others savour my effort and also for my own sense of healthy ego-fulfillment, I have decided to publish whatever little good I have written till now.

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, outsiders will have two versions of the Katrina experience. One version will be the images they recall from news coverage of the aftermath. The other will be the intimate portrayal of the determination of New Orleans residents to rebuild and recover their lives. HBO’s Treme offers outsiders an inside look into why New Orleanians refused to abandon a place that many questioned should not be rebuilt after the levees failed. This critically acclaimed series expanded the boundaries of television making in its format, plot, casting, use of music, and realism-in-fictionalized-TV. However, Treme is not just a story for the outside gaze on New Orleans. It was a very local, collaborative experience where the show’s creators sought to enlist the city in a commemorative project. Treme allowed many in the city who worked as principals, extras, and who tuned in as avid viewers to heal from the devastation of the disaster as they experimented with art, imitating life, imitating art. This book examines the impact of HBOs Treme not just as television making, but in the sense in which television provides a window to our worlds. The book pulls together scholarship in media, communications, gender, area studies, political economy, critical studies, African American studies and music to explain why Treme was not just about television.