When asked "What is the goal of a writer?" author Anne Lamott responded, "To help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds."This is what Jawad Mian achieves with Stray Reflections, an intimate account of his journey through life and lessons learned along the way. He delivers distilled infusions of clarity and inspiration in short chapters for reading in quiet moments at home or at the office.In his own search for meaning, Jawad draws from such sources as Rumi, Emerson, Goethe, Buddha, Confucius, Seneca, and many others. To read Stray Reflections is to be immersed in the timeless wisdom of the great poets, saints, and philosophers. This book is an antidote to the great angst of modern life.

Stray light is defined as unwanted light in an optical system, a familiar concept for anyone who has taken a photograph with the sun in or near their camera's field of view. In a low-cost consumer camera, stray light may be only a minor annoyance, but in a space-based telescope, it can result in the loss of data worth millions of dollars. It is imperative that optical system designers understand its consequences on system performance and adapt the design process to control it. This book addresses stray light terminology, radiometry, and the physics of stray light mechanisms, such as surface roughness scatter and ghost reflections. The most-efficient ways of using stray light analysis software packages are included. The book also demonstrates how the basic principles are applied in the design, fabrication, and testing phases of optical system development.

Logos of: CSIRO and Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) at foot of title page.

Thoughts Of A Stray Mind is a rare window into the mind of a teenager trying to find their way in the world. This is a must-read for teens who will relate to the author's insightful depictions of both everyday challenges and extraordinary, but often shared, events. This book speaks to teens. It brings meaning to all kinds of experiences. Luke Yates writes candidly, through poetry, about feelings so often diminished by adults and buried deep by high school peers.

For author Zakiah Sayeed, baring her soul to the world, releasing these intensely personal thoughts and feelings, is a freeing experience. Within these pages is solace and inspiration, happiness and sorrow, and a warm feeling of connection and shared understanding. Free verse poetry and flash fiction, it relies on stream of consciousness and ethereal connection cascading into awareness rather than preconceived rhythm and rhyme, her words true to the cadences of being, each a pulse—a reflection—that when viewed in their whole portrays a stunning breadth of emotion with resonance and beauty. Combined with prose and artfully crafted letters that provide insight into her life, her children, and her grandchildren, her fearless honesty displays for all to see the truth of her being.

Brutal and beautiful, Stray is the true story of a girl who runs away and finds herself. After growing up in a dysfunctional and emotionally abusive home, Tanya Marquardt runs away on her sixteenth birthday. Her departure is an act of rebellion and survival--whatever she is heading toward has to be better than what she is leaving behind. Struggling with her inner demons, Tanya must learn to take care of herself during two chaotic years in the working-class mill town of Port Alberni, followed by the early-nineties underground goth scene in Vancouver, British Columbia. She finds a chosen family in her fellow misfits, and the bond they form is fierce and unflinching. Told with raw honesty and strength, Stray reveals Tanya's fight to embrace the vulnerable, beguiling parts of herself and heal the wounds of her past as she forges her own path to a new life.

Poetry. Taking as his subject a series of historically significant inventions--from ancient mythologies to modern scientific wonders--Anthony Etherin explores the structure of language, combining various forms of verse with the most severe literary restrictions. Many of Anthony's poems experiment with palindromes and anagrams: Palindromic sonnets; triolets and sonnets composed of anagrammed lines; and, at the extremes of combinatorial constraint, palindromic poems that are perfect anagrams of each other. This book also introduces Anthony's "aelindromes"--an anagram-palindrome hybrid, in which letters are parsed and reordered according to premeditated numerical sequences. Complemented throughout with experiments in visual poetry, STRAY ARTS (AND OTHER INVENTIONS) presents a complex poetic formalism of previously untested intricacy. "I've seen people able to do perfect bottom deals at casino poker tables for 100 thousand dollar stakes, under heat. I've seen people able to do bottom deals at illegal mob games where everyone was carrying. This poetry is only a bit safer but way, way harder. And impresses me more. I love it."--Penn Jillette "Anthony Etherin renders all my own virtuoso ventures obsolete. I truly covet this book."--Christian B�k "Anthony Etherin is a hard taskmaster with language, making it jump through hoops, run long distances backwards, and then turn in on itself, in a strenuous series of contortions that leave it gleaming with word-sweat--but all this exercise is more than worth it, because the poems Anthony produces are dictionaries of possibilities, maps of linguistic futures that are well worth exploring if you want to find joy and delight and jaw-dropping skill."--Ian McMillan

From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. After selling her first novel--a dream she'd worked long and hard for--Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she'd left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she's pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn't totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it's possible to change the course of her history. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.