Strange Hearbeats aims to capture the varied spontaneous emotions that a lover feels when he or she falls irrevocably in love with someone. The feelings that erupt during these moments are so fresh and so new that it almost seems strange for the lover to comprehend. The book is a tribute to this magical feeling of love. Divided into six sections, this heartfelt collection of poems aims to depict the different phases of love.

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator tries to prove his sanity after murdering an elderly man because of his "vulture eye". His growing guilt leads him to hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, which drives him to confess the crime to the police.

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

In the half-century between 1890 and 1950, a variety of fields and disciplines, from musicology and literary studies to biology, psychology, genetics, and eugenics, expressed a profound interest in the subject of rhythm. In this book, Michael Golston recovers much of the work done in this area and situates it in the society, politics, and culture of the Modernist period. He then filters selected Modernist poems through this archive to demonstrate that innovations in prosody, form, and subject matter are based on a largely forgotten ideology of rhythm and that beneath Modernist prosody is a science and an accompanying technology. In his analysis, Golston first examines psychological and physiological experiments that purportedly proved that races responded differently to rhythmic stimuli. He then demonstrates how poets like Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Mina Loy, and William Carlos Williams either absorbed or echoed the information in these studies, using it to hone the innovative edge of Modernist practice and fundamentally alter the way poetry was written. Golston performs close readings of canonical texts such as Pound's Cantos, Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree," and William Carlos Williams's Paterson, and examines the role the sciences of rhythm played in racist discourses and fascist political thinking in the years leading up to World War II. Recovering obscure texts written in France, Germany, England, and America, Golston argues that "Rhythmics" was instrumental in generating an international modern art and should become a major consideration in our reading of reactionary avant-garde poetry.

Every human is born with a soul that tends to human pain. It's natural. But also natural is to lose it in the process of "growing up". We ignore where we came from and where we are marching to in this fleeting journey. Focused on our selfish motive we do not care about the damage we have done to our universe. Four Decades and a Poem is deeply human and reminds people of this missing factor, taking you through a trail of emotions. Written in various forms, old and contemporary, the book teaches you that there is more to life than just living. This is not about preaching or asking for unwanted change. As a city dweller, I am of the understanding that we are legally bound by social, cultural and political rights and yet of the knowledge that nothing can take our right to be human and no one, the right to steal that of another. Then, no change is needed. Included are topics on child abuse, girl child, alcoholism and youth issues besides others that call you to make your own decision and fathom the depth of your soul.

Nelson Riverdale, author of Across the Sands of Time, is back with his second book, Poems from a Broken Heart, a true story of his wife, Merlene Ann Martin, and his 30-year marriage to her. Nelson and Merlene knew of each other from Love Gospel Assembly, the Bronx church in NY they attended, but in a congregation of well over 350 people, the two never connected. It wasn't until he unexpectedly saw her at a Christian singles party that their relationship blossomed, and three years later, they were married. In his book, Poems of a Broken Heart, Nelson Riverdale recounts his life with Merlene, her many health issues, and her ultimate passing. In this intimately written story, the author shares his unending love for his wife through the dozens of poems he personally penned. He also opens up about the monstrous grief that brought him into a deep, dark valley of depression, which he called the “death zone.” Poems of a Broken Heart is the extraordinary story of a wonderful marriage that ended suddenly but continues on through the many heartfelt poems written by Nelson Riverdale. ———————— Advance Praise for Poem from a Broken Heart “A journey through grief much like my own when I was hanging from a thread.” —LGA Minister Larry Galloway, widower “Nelson Riverdale’s up-close and deeply personal journey into the depth of grief is a must-read for pastors, medical professionals, educators, life coaches, and those who are grieving. A literary anointing oil for recovery.” —Pastor Chelli Jackson, former Equity SAG-AFTRA professional performer, director of the audiovisual department & LGA Church Administrator

Poetry. Fiction. Ribitch was a surrealist, artist, poet, photographer, and storyteller. For the first time ever, his complete writings have been collected in two volumes, a project he started and his friends and family finished. This two-volume collection encompasses 50 years of his creative expression.