Download or read book Negotiations written by Destiny O. Birdsong and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Full of wonder." —Elizabeth Acevedo A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Entropy Magazine What makes a self? In her remarkable debut collection of poems, Destiny O. Birdsong writes fearlessly towards this question. Laced with ratchetry, yet hungering for its own respectability, Negotiations is about what it means to live in this America, about Cardi B and top-tier journal publications, about autoimmune disease and the speaker’s intense hunger for her own body—a surprise of self-love in the aftermath of both assault and diagnosis. It’s a series of love letters to black women, who are often singled out for abuse and assault, silencing and tokenism, fetishization and cultural appropriation in ways that throw the rock, then hide the hand. It is a book about tenderness and an indictment of people and systems that attempt to narrow black women’s lives, their power. But it is also an examination of complicity—both a narrative and a black box warning for a particular kind of self-healing that requires recognizing culpability when and where it exists.

Download or read book Nobody s Magic written by Destiny O. Birdsong and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The magic here is not the supernatural kind, but rather an attention to the grace of the ordinary. It is the magic of watching these women come into their power.”—New York Times A GMA Buzz Pick! A Most Anticipated Book by Essence · The Millions · Atlantic Journal Constitution · Glamour · Teen Vogue · Bustle · BookPage · Nashville Scene · Ms. Magazine · Parnassus Musing A Best Book of February by Washington Post · Nylon · BookRiot In this glittering triptych novel, Suzette, Maple and Agnes, three Black women with albinism, call Shreveport, Louisiana home. At the bustling crossroads of the American South and Southwest, these three women find themselves at the crossroads of their own lives. Suzette, a pampered twenty-year‑old, has been sheltered from the outside world since a dangerous childhood encounter. Now, a budding romance with a sweet mechanic allows Suzette to seek independence, which unleashes dark reactions in those closest to her. In discovering her autonomy, Suzette is forced to decide what she is willing to sacrifice in order to make her own way in the world. Maple is reeling from the unsolved murder of her free‑spirited mother. She flees the media circus and her judgmental grandmother by shutting herself off from the world in a spare room of the motel where she works. One night, at a party, Maple connects with Chad, someone who may understand her pain more than she realizes, and she discovers that the key to her mother's death may be within her reach. Agnes is far from home, working yet another mind‑numbing job. She attracts the interest of a lonely security guard and army veteran who’s looking for a traditional life for himself and his young son. He’s convinced that she wields a certain “magic,” but Agnes soon unleashes a power within herself that will shock them both and send her on a trip to confront not only her family and her past, but also herself. This novel, told in three parts, is a searing meditation on grief, female strength, and self‑discovery set against a backdrop of complicated social and racial histories. Nobody's Magic is a testament to the power of family—the ones you're born in and the ones you choose. And in these three narratives, among the yearning and loss, each of these women may find a seed of hope for the future.

Download or read book Consolations written by David Whyte and published by Canongate Books. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Consolations David Whyte unpacks aspects of being human that many of us spend our lives trying vainly to avoid - loss, heartbreak, vulnerability, fear - boldly reinterpreting them, fully embracing their complexity, never shying away from paradox in his relentless search for meaning. Beginning with 'Alone' and closing with 'Withdrawal', each piece in this life-affirming book is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling overwhelmed and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness something that accompanies the first stage of revelation. Consolations invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

Download or read book Anodyne written by Khadijah Queen and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colorado Book Awards Finalist for Poetry Shortlisted for the Reading the West Poetry Book Award The poems that make up Anodyne consider the small moments that enrapture us alongside the daily threats of cataclysm. Formally dynamic and searingly personal, Anodyne asks us to recognize the echoes of history that litter the landscape of our bodies as we navigate a complex terrain of survival and longing. With an intimate and multivocal dexterity, these poems acknowledge the simultaneous existence of joy and devastation, knowledge and ignorance, grief and love, endurance and failure—all of the contrast and serendipity that comes with the experience of being human. If the body is a world, or a metaphor for the world, for what disappears and what remains, for what we feel and what we cover up, then how do we balance fate and choice, pleasure and pain? Through a combination of formal lyrics, delicate experiments, sharp rants, musical litany, and moments of wit that uplift and unsettle, Queen’s poems show us the terrible consequences and stunning miracles of how we choose to live.

Download or read book Naming Our Destiny written by June Jordan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 1993-02-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poems deal with racism, oppression, justice, ecology, poverty, and life in modern American

Download or read book Ordinary Girls written by Jaquira Díaz and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the Must-Read Books of 2019 According to O: The Oprah Magazine * Time * Bustle * Electric Literature * Publishers Weekly * The Millions * The Week * Good Housekeeping “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging girlhood and triumphant coming of age. While growing up in housing projects in Puerto Rico and Miami Beach, Díaz found herself caught between extremes. As her family split apart and her mother battled schizophrenia, she was supported by the love of her friends. As she longed for a family and home, her life was upended by violence. As she celebrated her Puerto Rican culture, she couldn’t find support for her burgeoning sexual identity. From her own struggles with depression and sexual assault to Puerto Rico’s history of colonialism, every page of Ordinary Girls vibrates with music and lyricism. Díaz writes with raw and refreshing honesty, triumphantly mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope to become her version of the girl she always wanted to be. Reminiscent of Tara Westover’s Educated, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, Jaquira Díaz’s memoir provides a vivid portrait of a life lived in (and beyond) the borders of Puerto Rico and its complicated history—and reads as electrically as a novel.

Download or read book A Fortune for Your Disaster written by Hanif Abdurraqib and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “When an author’s unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it’s tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry.” —Booklist, Starred Review In his much-anticipated follow-up to The Crown Ain't Worth Much, poet, essayist, biographer, and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a book of poems about how one rebuilds oneself after a heartbreak, the kind that renders them a different version of themselves than the one they knew. It's a book about a mother's death, and admitting that Michael Jordan pushed off, about forgiveness, and how none of the author's black friends wanted to listen to "Don't Stop Believin'." It's about wrestling with histories, personal and shared. Abdurraqib uses touchstones from the world outside—from Marvin Gaye to Nikola Tesla to his neighbor's dogs—to create a mirror, inside of which every angle presents a new possibility.

Download or read book Destiny Manifested written by Bonnie Larson Staiger and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Love at First Sight written by Wislawa Szymborska and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poem by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, illustrated for readers of all ages that will challenge assumptions about falling in love. They’re both convinced / that a sudden passion joined them. Such certainty is beautiful, / but uncertainty is more beautiful still. Love at First Sight is a poem about love and chance and destiny by the 1996 Polish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Illustrated by Italian artist Beatrice Gasca Queirazza, Szymborska’s poem comes to life in entirely new ways for her readers and for lovers everywhere in this oversized book perfect for gift giving. Szymborska tells of two young lovers bound together in an instant—or were they? As the poem unfolds, the reader’s assumptions—like those of the lovers themselves—about certainty and destiny are utterly upended, revealing the paradox and mystery of fate. Here is randomness, tricks of memory, and chance, where noticing the smallest details of our intertwined lives is more essential than asking, Are we meant for each other? “Every beginning / is only a sequel, after all…”

Download or read book Changing Destiny written by Ben Okri and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-09 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two actors, a thousand characters, and the story of how a kingdom is changed... An epic new adaptation of the 4,000-year-old Egyptian poem about the Warrior King, Sinuhe written by Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri that captures the essence of humanity and the complexities of immigration. This edition of Changing Destiny is published to coincide with the world premiere performance at London's Young Vic Theatre, directed by Young Vic Artistic Director Kwame Kwei-Armah.

Download or read book Destiny Rewritten written by Kathryn Fitzmaurice and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-02-27 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sweet contemporary story about poetry, family, and determining your own destiny is perfect for fans of books by Wendy Mass, Joan Bauer, Sharon Creech, and Rebecca Stead. Eleven-year-old Emily Elizabeth Davis has never met her father, so when a book of poetry with his name in it goes missing, Emily and her friends search all over their hometown of Berkeley, California, hoping to track it down. Meanwhile, even though her English-professor mother insists that Emily is destined to become a poet (she named her after Emily Dickinson!), Emily secretly corresponds with her idol, romance writer Danielle Steel. As Publishers Weekly says, "Fitzmaurice's story deftly mingles Dickinson, Danielle Steel, a budding crush, and protesting tree sitters while maintaining suspense that leads to a satisfying ending."

Download or read book Registers of Illuminated Villages written by Tarfia Faizullah and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Tarfia Faizullah is a poet of brave and unflinching vision.” —Natasha Trethewey Somebody is always singing. Songs were not allowed. Mother said, Dance and the bells will sing with you. I slithered. Glass beneath my feet. I locked the door. I did not die. I shaved my head. Until the horns I knew were there were visible. Until the doorknob went silent. —from “100 Bells” Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices—elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and—even in its unsparing brutality—full of love.

Download or read book Spear of Destiny written by Jasper Bark and published by Abaddon Books. This book was released on 2006-08-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One bullet can change history... Berlin, 1945. Karl Fairburne is a member of an elite sniper corps, working for the American secret service deep behind enemy lines. Stalin's troops have over run the city looking to revenge the battle of Stalingrad and seize control of the Nazi's nuclear secrets before their British and American allies. SS General Helmstadt, head of the Nazi nuclear programme, is defecting to Russia, but first he plans the ultimate act of vengeance, to make the US pay for the defeat of the Third Reich. If he succeeds Russia will win the Cold War before it has even begun. Karl has one chance to stop him. A single sniper's bullet will change the course of history.

Download or read book Roads of Destiny written by O. Henry and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Download or read book The Real Horse written by Farid Matuk and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded by a rigorously innovative attention to form, The Real Horse offers a testament to and reminder of a daughter's disobedience to cultural patrimony.

Download or read book Nature Poem written by Tommy Pico and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Download or read book Roads of Destiny Illustrated written by O Henry and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-12 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Marsh (Bowers), an inventor, is in love with Ann Hardy (Novak), but his brother Lewis also loves her. Lewis previously loved Rose Merritt (Frederick), but betrayed her and has cast her off. When he sees the success of David with Ann, Lewis reproaches his brother and threatens to end his own life unless he can marry Ann. David, overcome with these events, sinks into an armchair and falls asleep. In his dreams, the figure of Fate (George) appears and tells him that no matter which road he takes, he will find happiness with Ann and will marry her only. Then follow three dreams, one taking place in the North, one in the West, and one in his home town. When he awakes, he finds that Lewis was greeted with the same apparition and has decided to marry Rose, while David marries Ann.