Man vs. Poetry: The struggle continues. Wherein the author continues his struggle with the written word in this new volume of what some might call "poetry" … if they had low standards. You will find contained within further musings on such random topics as chickens, lumberjacks, parrots, planks, rental lodging, and how to die convincingly on stage. Compiled (or maybe "accreted" is a better word) over the course of several years, Artisanal Gibberish II: Yet More Gibberish is the culmination of six years of University and a lifetime of experiences. CAUTION: We advise against drinking anything hot while reading these poems, to avoid nasal scalding.

BEST OF THE YEAR Kirkus · Parents · Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association · Chicago Public Library · Washington Post · Evanston Public Library · Los Angeles Public Library Charlotte Huck Recommended Book Common Sense Media Selection It’s Dat’s first day of school in a new country! Dat and his Mah made a long journey to get here, and Dat doesn’t know the language. To Dat, everything everybody says — from the school bus driver to his new classmates — sounds like gibberish. How is Dat going to make new friends if they can’t understand each other? Luckily there’s a friendly girl in Dat’s class who knows that there are other ways to communicate, besides just talking. Could she help make sense of the gibberish? P R A I S E “A superb picture book.” —The Wall Street Journal “Masterly. A tender reflection.” —The New York Times ★ “The execution is stellar. A visually and emotionally immersive immigration story.” —Kirkus (starred) ★ “Delightful. Beginning readers will love this book as the illustrations say it all.” —School Library Connection (starred) ★ “Will give hope to kids dealing with a new country and could inspire others to reach out to struggling immigrant children.” —Booklist (starred)

This compelling reference work introduces the religions of Voodoo, a onetime faith of the Mississippi River Valley, and Vodou, a Haitian faith with millions of adherents today. Unlike its fictional depiction in zombie films and popular culture, Voodoo is a full-fledged religion with a pantheon of deities, a priesthood, and communities of believers. Drawing from the expertise of contemporary practitioners, this encyclopedia presents the history, culture, and religion of Haitian Vodou and Mississippi Valley Voodoo. Though based primarily in these two regions, the reference looks at Voodoo across several cultures and delves into related religions, including African Vodu, African Diasporic Religions, and magical practices like hoodoo. Through roughly 150 alphabetical entries, the work describes various aspects of Voodoo in Louisiana and Haiti, covering topics such as important places, traditions, rituals, and items used in ceremonies. Contributions from scholars in the field provide a comprehensive overview of the subject from various perspectives and address the deities and ceremonial acts. The book features an extensive collection of primary sources and a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic resources.

In this dramatic one-volume sci-fi trilogy, three spacecraft crash land on Earth following the destruction of a far-off planet by two warring royal houses. Now, with the discovery of the third craft, the rivalry breaks out in an apocalyptic battle to determine Earth's future. It is a battle between equally determined forces involving two princes, the Queen Mother, and the humans the rival aliens have adapted themselves to — including the twins Joe and Hawk and their father Frank Grayer, an intelligence agent for the U.S. Department of Defense. The Third Craft is a spirited, gripping saga of morality, cosmic civil war, and human evolution — an adventure into the limits of technology, the nature of evil, and the destiny of humankind. JAMES T. HARRIS is a cosmologist, successful businessman, and self-taught chemist. He was born in Montreal, worked in Northern Ontario, and now lives in London, Ontario. Harris has a broad range of interests, including collecting art, quantum physics, flying as a private pilot, ice hockey, and piano, which he learned to play as an adult. His next novel, The Caretaker, is a graphic ghost story, to be published in 2013.

The Improv Dictionary: An A to Z of Improvisational Terms, Techniques, and Tools explores improvisational approaches and concepts drawn from a multitude of movements and schools of thought to enhance spontaneous and collaborative creativity. This accessible resource reveals and interrogates the inherited wisdoms contained in the very words we use to describe modern improv. Each detailed definition goes beyond the obvious clichés and seeks a nuanced and inclusive understanding of how art of the moment can be much more than easy laughs and cheap gags (even when it is being delightfully irreverent and wildly funny). This encyclopedic work pulls from a wide array of practitioners and practices, finding tensions and commonalities from styles as diverse as Theatresports, Comedysportz, the Harold, narrative long-form, Playback Theatre, and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Entries include nuanced definitions, helpful examples, detailed explorations of the concepts in practice, and framing quotes from a leading practitioner or inspirational artistic voice. The Improv Dictionary offers valuable insights to novice improvisers taking their first steps in the craft, seasoned performers seeking to unlock the next level of abandon, instructors craving a new comprehensive resource, and scholars working in one of the numerous allied fields that find enrichment through collaborative and guided play. Each significant entry in the book is also keyed to an accompanying improv game or exercise housed at www.improvdr.com, enabling readers to dig deeper into their process.

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

She's dead broke. And eviction looms. On Christmas Eve antique consultant Madison Knight takes a phone call from local rancher Zach Murdock. Through a mix-up at an estate sale, Madison's company purchased his grandmother's beloved painting. He offers double the money for its return. Madison risks her job to track down the artwork, but success falls short when she's stuck in a blizzard. Stranded, she seeks help from a frontier family. Are they living off the grid, or did she somehow travel through time? Zach's the only person who knows her plan. He also knows a secret about his gran's painting. It's up to him to rescue Madison, but maybe he's not cut out to be a hero.

Casting aside critical shibboleths in place for centuries, Kenneth Craven's Jonathan Swift and the Millennium of Madness proposes a new view of intellectual history. This revisionary study documents Swift's intimate knowledge of seventeenth-century science from Bacon and the Invisible College at Oxford to the Newtonian synthesis within the context of Paracelsian medicine and the chemical-mechanical split. Craven shows that Swift joins the philosophies of a neoplatonic divine order, Epicurean atomism, the Reformation, and scientific millenarianism as permeating his time with millennial myths sure eventually to detonate the sense of composure of individuals and societies. In contradistinction, Swift elucidates links between the humors traditions in medicine and literature, saturnine melancholy and the dreaming god Kronos. He proposes the somber realism of the Kronos myth as providing awareness of the self-imposed restraints on ego needed to preclude the proliferation of modern information systems into trivialization of the human enterprise to meaninglessness. This fresh and exhaustive examination of the Anglo-Irish writer's first masterpiece, A Tale of a Tub (1704) unlocks barriers to seeing the nature of Swift's complex integrity, passion, and literary achievements throughout a career studded with disappointments. Specifically, this study authoritatively reveals the identity of unnamed victims of Swift's satire as the deist John Toland and his republican hero, John Milton, for their advocacy of the Puritan Revolution and regicide; Toland's mentor John Locke and another Lockean disciple, Lord Shaftesbury, who confused happiness and self-interest with delusion and the public weal; and his tormentors in the Church of Ireland, Narcissus Marsh and Peter Browne.

Music is, in one sense, merely a series of fleeting vibrations that arise and subside. How could it be that something so insubstantial fills us, and calms us, and makes us weep? Because, says W. A. Mathieu, music bridges mind and heart, self and other, and affirms our place in the world. Everyone uses the bridge of music, from casual listeners to devoted professionals. Mathieu's delightful and trenchant prose asks you to question what music is, how it works, and how to understand its value in your life, in the life of your community, and in the evolution of the cosmos.