A new collection of poetry by acclaimed UK poet Robin Robertson

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Scottish poet’s fourth collection shimmers with “an oneiric charge and intensity” (Guardian, UK). The Wrecking Light is an intense, moving, bleakly lyrical, and at times shocking book. These poems are written with the authority of classical myth, yet sound utterly contemporary. The poet’s gaze—whether on the natural world or the details of his own life—is unflinching and clear, its utter seriousness leavened by a wry, dry, and disarming humor. Alongside fine translations from Neruda and Montale and dynamic retellings of stories from Ovid, the poems here pitch the power and wonder of nature against the frailty and failure of human beings. This is a book of considerable grandeur and sweep that confirms Robertson as one of the most arresting and powerful poets at work today.

SOUND EXPLOSION INSIDE L.A.S STUDIO FACTORY WITH THE WRECKING CREW

The excavator goes, "chumma chumma hufft hufft FALUMP." The steamroller goes, "CHUG chug CHUG chug moooooosh." The wrecking ball goes, "BOOOOOM!" Come on down to the construction site and make some noise with eight exciting construction vehicles as they rumble, crunch, chug, and boom their way through this lively book! Plus, this is the fixed format version, which will look almost identical to the print version. Additionally for devices that support audio, this ebook includes a read-along setting.

CATCH A GLOW, is both reverent and a reckoning. Iglesias moves through raw narratives with the strength, grace and focus of a dancer: combining moves, challenging rhythms, guiding each poem beyond routine and into the open bliss of abandon, the way truth-telling tends to feel. -Dasha Kelly, Wisconsin Poet Laureate Karl Michael Iglesias invents a new grammar in CATCH A GLOW. Finding the official language used to describe Hurricane Maria lacking, Iglesias has electrified the language in his book by stacking verbs, breaking lines in the middle of sentences, and using caesuras to alter logic. Iglesias has given us a book of poems up to the challenge of holding our grief and rage. -José Olivarez, CITIZEN ILLEGAL CATCH A GLOW is a beautiful collage of fragments that create a new Boricua diaspora, in a post-Hurricane Maria world. With his use of staccato phrases and rhythmic language, Iglesias reenacts on the page, both the splintering and mending of a people and nation. This is an important and much-needed collection. -Mayda Del Valle, A SOUTH SIDE GIRL'S GUIDE TO LOVE & SEX As if a storm blew through, the poems in CATCH A GLOW are left wind-sharpened and rain-beaten, fragments sometimes whittled into blades, other times the edges are smooth as music drifting from yard to window. These poems sing their jagged love songs for the people and land of Puerto Rico brilliantly, illuminating for me bright lessons on intimacy, justice, and survival. Karl Michael Iglesias takes up this book's broken, mosaic style and does his people right. Like money or parcel packed heavy with supplies to get the living done, these poems soar their way to the island and our hearts with their urgent, skillful care. -Danez Smith, HOMIE If hurricane poetry was a genre, Karl Michael Iglesias would be at the vanguard of its practice. CATCH A GLOW is a book that comes at you from the outset. The fragmented diaspora is alive in Iglesias's concision. His witness is biting in its undecorated minimalism. We are literally left to deal with the white spaces between the wreckage depicted in these poems. CATCH A GLOW is made of items, memories, and people who survived the longest blackout in history to take jibaro baths and who were left to count the names after the destruction. You can find that which is spoken, whispered, and buried in Iglesias' book. No need to answer when they ask "Were you affected by Hurricane Maria?" Just give them this book." -Willie Perdomo, THE CRAZY BUNCH

Winner of the Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction and Los Angeles Times bestseller "It makes good music sound better."-Janet Maslin in The New York Times "A fascinating look into the West Coast recording studio scene of the '60s and the inside story of the music you heard on the radio. If you always assumed the musicians you listened to were the same people you saw onstage, you are in for a big surprise!"-Dusty Street, host of Classic Vinyl on Sirius XM Satellite Radio If you were a fan of popular music in the 1960s and early '70s, you were a fan of the Wrecking Crew-whether you knew it or not. On hit record after hit record by everyone from the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and the Monkees to the Grass Roots, the 5th Dimension, Sonny & Cher, and Simon & Garfunkel, this collection of West Coast studio musicians from diverse backgrounds established themselves in Los Angeles, California as the driving sound of pop music-sometimes over the objection of actual band members forced to make way for Wrecking Crew members. Industry insider Kent Hartman tells the dramatic, definitive story of the musicians who forged a reputation throughout the business as the secret weapons behind the top recording stars. Mining invaluable interviews, the author follows the careers of such session masters as drummer Hal Blaine and keyboardist Larry Knechtel, as well as trailblazing bassist Carol Kaye-the only female in the bunch-who went on to play in thousands of recording sessions in this rock history. Readers will discover the Wrecking Crew members who would forge careers in their own right, including Glen Campbell and Leon Russell, and learn of the relationship between the Crew and such legends as Phil Spector and Jimmy Webb. Hartman also takes us inside the studio for the legendary sessions that gave us Pet Sounds, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and the rock classic "Layla," which Wrecking Crew drummer Jim Gordon cowrote with Eric Clapton for Derek and the Dominos. And the author recounts priceless scenes such as Mike Nesmith of the Monkees facing off with studio head Don Kirshner, Grass Roots lead guitarist (and future star of The Office) Creed Bratton getting fired from the group, and Michel Rubini unseating Frank Sinatra's pianist for the session in which the iconic singer improvised the hit-making ending to "Strangers in the Night." The Wrecking Crew tells the collective, behind-the-scenes stories of the artists who dominated Top 40 radio during the most exciting time in American popular culture.

"Little rig, little rig, let me come in!" "Not by the chrome on my chinny chin chin." "Then I’ll crash and I’ll bash and I’ll smash your house in." When the three little rigs set out to build their own garages, each one thinks that his is going to be the strongest. But then the big bad wrecking ball comes to call and threatens to smash their new homes to smithereens. The brothers learn that it’s only by bravery and teamwork that they can win the day. A comic sequel to the ugly truckling.

In 1839, Emily's husband vanishes from an isolated island off the coast of Key West where he tends to the lighthouse. Emily takes charge of the lighthouse to support her three children. But unexpected help arrives when a runaway slave washes up on their beach.

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it. Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.

An “entertaining” historical investigation into the scavengers who have profited off the spoils of maritime disasters (The Washington Post). Even today, Britain’s coastline remains a dangerous place. It is an island soaked by four separate seas, with shifting sand banks to the east, veiled reefs to the west, powerful currents above, and the world’s busiest shipping channel below. The country’s offshore waters are strewn with shipwrecks—and for villagers scratching out an existence along Britain’s shores, those wrecks have been more than simply an act of God; in many cases, they have been the difference between living well and just getting by. Though Daphne du Maurier and Poldark have made Cornwall famous as Britain’s most notorious region for wrecking, many other coastal communities regarded the “sea’s bounty” as a way of providing themselves with everything from grapefruits to grand pianos. Some plunderers were held to be so skilled that they could strip a ship from stem to stern before the Coast Guard had even left port. Some were rumored to lure ships onto the rocks with false lights, and some simply waited for winter gales to do their work. This book uncovers tales of ships and shipwreck victims—from shoreline orgies so Dionysian that few participants survived the morning to humble homes fitted with silver candelabra, from coastlines rigged like stage sets to villages where everyone owns identical tennis shoes. Spanning three hundred years of history, The Wreckers examines the myths, realities, and superstitions of shipwrecks and uncovers the darker side of life on Britain’s shores. “Bathurst, who won a Somerset Maugham Award for The Lighthouse Stevensons, offers a spellbinding tale of seafaring men, their ships and the ocean that cares for neither.” —Publishers Weekly “A fascinating, haunting account of pillagers, plunderers, and pirates.” —John Burnett, author of Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas