Carlo Rovelli, Italian physicist, says that "the world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events." Poet Diane Louie thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. They draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion: spinning while orbiting, actively shifting our point of view. More genus than hybrid species, prose poems can straddle the obvious limits and less-obvious liberties of perception. This active characteristic of spanning and connecting is especially relevant in a time of cultural polarization. Marrying, even uneasily, the inquiries of science and spiritual longing can illuminate what they—and we—have in common: a desire to understand our presence in a universe that does not yield ultimate answers.

Explains the significance and beauty of fractals using over 170 illustrations.

Sedimentary coasts with their unique forms of life and productive ecosystems are one of the most threatened parts of the biosphere. This volume analyzes and compares ecological structures and processes at sandy beaches, tidal mudflats and in shallow coastal waters all around the world. Analyses of local processes are paired with comparisons between distant shores, across latitudinal gradients or between separate biogeographic provinces. Emphasis is given to suspension feeders in coastal mud and sand, to biogenic stabilizations and disturbances in coastal sediments, to seagrass beds and faunal assemblages across latitudes and oceans, to recovery dynamics in benthic communities, shorebird predation, and to experimental approaches to the biota of sedimentary shores.

A rollicking, no-holds-barred memoir, "The Jokes Over" is the definitive inside story of Hunter S. Thompson and the Gonzo years.

This exquisitely giftable anthology of poems about age and aging reveals the wisdom of trailblazing writers who found power and growth later in life. At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years. Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before. To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.

“An unabashed celebration of complexity in queerness and gender, an arresting snapshot of survival and a triumphant reclamation of language.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review) “Tongues make mistakes / and mistakes / make languages.” And Benjamin Garcia makes a stunning debut with Thrown in the Throat. In a sex-positive incantation that retextures what it is to write a queer life amidst troubled times, Garcia writes boldly of citizenship, family, and Adam Rippon’s butt. Detailing a childhood spent undocumented, one speaker recalls nights when “because we cannot sleep / we dream with open eyes.” Garcia delves with both English and Spanish into how one survives a country’s long love affair with anti-immigrant cruelty. Rendering a family working to the very end to hold each other, he writes the kind of family you both survive and survive with. With language that arrives equal parts regal and raucous, Thrown in the Throat shines brilliant with sweat and an iridescent voice. “Sometimes even a diamond was once alive” writes Garcia in a collection that National Poetry Series judge Kazim Ali says “has deadly superpowers.” And indeed these poems arrive to our hands through touch-me-nots and the slight cruelty of mothers, through closets both real and metaphorical. These are poems complex, unabashed, and needed as survival. Garcia’s debut is nothing less than exactly the ode our history and present and our future call for: brash and unmistakably alive. “Angry, tender, and resounding with the speech of flowers, birds, and diamonds, every syllable carries a glorious charge.” —The Boston Globe, “Best Books of 2020” “Electrifying . . . explores unrepentant sexual desire, interrogates fraught familial relationships, and examines our troubled cultural moment.” —Lambda Literary

For almost ten years chaos and fractals have been enveloping many areas of mathematics and the natural sciences in their power, creativity and expanse. Reaching far beyond the traditional bounds of mathematics and science to the realms of popular culture, they have captured the attention and enthusiasm of a worldwide audience. The fourteen chapters of the book cover the central ideas and concepts, as well as many related topics including, the Mandelbrot Set, Julia Sets, Cellular Automata, L-Systems, Percolation and Strange Attractors, and each closes with the computer code for a central experiment. In the two appendices, Yuval Fisher discusses the details and ideas of fractal image compression, while Carl J.G. Evertsz and Benoit Mandelbrot introduce the foundations and implications of multifractals.

In Coming to Our Senses, cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that prevailing theories of perception, cognition, and information cannot explain how we know the world around us. Using scientific studies and true stories, McCabe shows that the ecological disasters, political paralysis, and economic failures we now face originate in our tendency to privilege cognitive processes and products over the information we access with our perceptual systems. As a result, we typically default to making decisions using inaccurate information such as mechanistic theories that reduce the world to extractable, exploitable parts. But the world does not function as an assembly of parts; it functions as a coalition of complex systems--from cells to cities--that organize and sustain themselves and cannot be partitioned and retain their purpose. McCabe also argues that we cannot describe such systems using theories and words. Instead, each system reveals itself in fractal-like geometric configurations that emerge from and reflect the structural organization that brings it into existence and determines its functions--a veritable physics of information. Thus, we comprehend phenomena as disparate as neural networks, river deltas, and economies by perceiving the branching geometry that organizes them into distribution systems. McCabe's key point is that form not only follows function, it doubles as information. If we put our theories aside and focus on the information the world displays, our perceptions can block hostile mental takeovers, reconnect us to reality, and bring us back to our senses.

Ecologists sometimes have a less-than-rigorous background in quantitative methods, yet research within this broad field is becoming increasingly mathematical. Written in a step-by-step fashion, Fractals and Multifractals in Ecology and Aquatic Science provides scientists with a basic understanding of fractals and multifractals and the techniques fo