A new chapbook of poems by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Finalist for the New England Book Award From a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional margins Negative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness. For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender. Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.

From the city streets of Blackwood to the country roads of Nordelle, come along with Special Agent David Carter of the Central Investigations Unit (CIU) on the ride of his life.David Carter is young, eager, and naïve. When he is chosen from a pool of agents for a special undercover assignment, David sees it as an opportunity despite his obvious lack of wisdom, training, and experience. Can David prove himself worthy of the trust placed in him? Dieter Kleinmann is on a mission to bring down his longtime nemesis, Frank Alexander. As director of the CIU, Dieter has the authority to investigate Alexander’s organization. Can Dieter orchestrate the downfall of Frank Alexander? Drug lord and arms dealer Frank Alexander runs Blackwood. He is King. He is ruthless. He is also a husband and a father of two young daughters that he loves dearly. A contradiction? Not to a man who has mastered the art of compartmentalization. But, when the walls of his partitioned life start to crumble, can Frank continue being King? Adrianna Parker is a good woman in a bad relationship. Will a chance meeting with an old friend give her the opportunity, and the courage, she needs to break free and start over?

a slice from the cake made of air processes the physical and mental trauma of abortion coupled with the desires for sexual and emotional love against a backdrop of contemporary culture--with all the sexualization that comes with race, gender, and landscape. From front to back the book is wound through with a single poem whose language is permuted, translated, and retranslated (from English to English) as it cycles around abortion, both asking "what artifact / do I resemble" and stating "small love / small / you failed it / in person." The poems directly confront the sexual self ("This isn't a real orgasm, a real patellar fatigue") and take up the thesis abstract as a malleable form for interrogating the inevitable intersections and overlaps of brains and bodies. Sexy and volatile, a slice from the cake made of air winds over and through itself, with no conclusions or solutions for the mess of living in the world.

The shooting of a homicide detective is captured on film by a mysterious figure from a second-floor window, implicating Riley Keane, an anti-gun activist and a school shooting survivor. Riley flees Chicago for a frozen island in Lake Superior. A race to find her ensues between her secret lover— Chicago politician Finn O' Farrell— a corrupt police lieutenant, and the mysterious cameraman who extorts Riley' s family and Finn. Finn' s entanglement with Riley and the extortionist threatens his ambitious political career. On the island, Riley ingratiates herself into the close-knit community, but when she witnesses both an islander' s murder and another death in a suspicious boating accident, the local sheriff starts asking questions that begin to unravel her true identity. As the sheriff and the FBI are closing in on Riley, Finn faces media pressure to reveal his mysterious role in that long ago school shooting. If the facts come out, Finn may go to prison, but his biggest fear is that the truth will forever sever his relationship with Riley.

Special Boxed Set! The first three books in the Cornwall & Company Mystery Series! Read the first three books in the Cornwall & Company Mystery series at a special price! You get: Book 1: Who Hates Marigold Flowers? How does a wedding planner from Lake Placid, New York end up in the trunk of a Toyota Corolla submerged in a frozen lake near Windham, nearly two hundred miles away? It's easy if you've got two contract killers after you! Marigold Flowers doesn't understand why anyone would want to kill her. Her specialty is parties, not crime. But there's no denying that someone with a lot of money and significant resources is out to silence her. What secrets does she hold about international money laundering and a criminal syndicate? Book 2: In the Shadows of a Lie Booted out of the Department of Justice’s WitSec program, suspected of orchestrating the attempted murder of a US Marshal…how can life get any more perilous for Marigold Flowers? Now that she's shed her old alias, the reborn Olivia Michaud is determined to prove her innocence with the help of Jefferson Cornwall, best-selling thriller author and TV producer, and his brothers. What does all this have to do with her WitSec life in Rhode Island? Was it her fault Jared Spears was brutally murdered? With millions of dollars at stake, and a clever villain on her heels, Olivia is determined to figure out the secret her fiancé took to the grave with him. Book 3: Bury Me in Paradise Now settled in Atlanta, Olivia Michaud is shocked to discover she's still on someone's hit list. Desperate to keep her alive, Jefferson Cornwall sends her off to stay with friends of his who are retired FBI agents. But there is nowhere safe for this damsel in distress! Snatched in Georgia by a couple of hired thugs, Olivia is tossed into the back of a van for a harrowing trip down to Florida. The mastermind of this twisted scheme needs to keep her alive long enough to retrieve a fortune in laundered money in Curaçao. As Jefferson Cornwall and his security team work feverishly to locate the missing woman, time is running out for Olivia. The minute that boat hits international waters, she may be lost forever. Can the plucky heroine keep her wits about her, even as a ruthless murderer continues his killing spree?

It was an escape from a PoW camp as daring and fraught with danger as any immortalised by Hollywood. Yet the story is less familiar than most as it concerns the only German prisoner of war to escape from captivity in mainland Britain and make it home during either World War.After being caught in Gibraltar during an earlier attempt to return to his homeland, Pluschow and other captured Germans were shipped to Plymouth and then on to the PoW camp at Donington Hall, where he arrived in May 1915.On July 4 he and fellow prisoner Oskar Trefftz broke out by climbing over two 9ft barbed wire fences, before changing clothes and walking 15 miles to Derby where they caught a train to London.By the next morning the men's escape was featured in the Daily Sketch newspaper with both names and descriptions of the pair. They went their separate ways but Trefftz was recaptured at Millwall Docks. Realising he had to alter his appearance, Pluschow removed his smart tie and handed his coat in at the cloakroom at Blackfriars station. The German then used scraped-up coal dust, boot polish and Vaseline to change his fair hair to greasy black and covered himself in soot to make him appear as a dock worker. Pluschow then stowed away on a Dutch steamer ship at Tilbury docks, talked his way past a policeman in Holland before travelling to Germany by train. Upon his return home he received a hero's welcome and was presented with the Iron Cross First Class.This extraordinary story is told in Gunther's own words for the first time in English.