"Lindsay's poems open doors to other worlds and other ways of seeing."--New York Times

Presents a collection of surreal poems that blend science and art.

Read your way across North Carolina's Piedmont in the second of a series of regional guides that bring the state's rich literary history to life for travelers and residents. Eighteen tours direct readers to sites that more than two hundred Tar Heel authors have explored in their fiction, poetry, plays, and creative nonfiction. Along the way, excerpts chosen by author Georgann Eubanks illustrate a writer's connection to a specific place or reveal intriguing local culture--insights rarely found in travel guidebooks. Featured authors include O. Henry, Doris Betts, Alex Haley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, John Hart, Betty Smith, Edward R. Murrow, Patricia Cornwell, Carson McCullers, Maya Angelou, Lee Smith, Reynolds Price, and David Sedaris. Literary Trails is an exciting way to see anew the places that you already love and to discover new people and places you hadn't known about. The region's rich literary heritage will surprise and delight all readers.

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with Twists No man of letters savors the ABC's, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from adhominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better. This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com? Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a "girl gillie," and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a "giantess" than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative. As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,' that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat." Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

In a world of fantasy, two enemies square off against one another: Grimlindus, the general, necromancer and suave lord of evil; and Ariadne, young refugee princess, fleeing the invasion of her homeland and the murder of her family. Grimlindus is armed with an evil Sword of Death and has an army of barbarians, knights, wizards, assassins and dragons. Ariadne only has a score of adventurers to assist her—a ragtag bunch of wizards, warriors and thieves—many with unclear intentions and dubious morals. With their help, she must escape the clutches of Grimlindus’s henchmen and the machinations of foreign lords who would use her for their designs, and must determine how to win back her father’s Kingdom. In the end, it will all fall to the roll of the knucklebones.

Winner: 2007 P. K. Page Founders' Award Winner: 2008 Great Canadian Literary Hunt Finalist: 2008 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award In Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, Jeff Latosik considers states of durability and longevity in an age of ephemeral mores and instant gratification. Probing the pressure points where notions of physical, psychological, and technological strength continually threaten to erupt into their opposites, these poems ask which aspects of our daily lives might actually last beyond the here and now, beyond their own inherent limitations of time, person, and place.

Award-winning poet David Wagoner and renowned editor David Lehman present the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry—"a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title" (Chicago Tribune). Eagerly anticipated by scholars, students, readers, and poets alike, Scribner’s Best American Poetry series has achieved brand-name status in the literary world, serving as a yearly guide to who’s who in American poetry. Known for his marvelous narrative skill and humane wit, David Wagoner is one of the few poets of his generation to win the universal admiration of his peers. Working in conjunction with series editor David Lehman, Wagoner brings his refreshing eye to this year’s anthology. With new work by established poets, such as Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Mark Doty, and Bob Hicok, The Best American Poetry 2009 also features some of tomorrow’s leading luminaries. Readers of all ages and backgrounds will treasure this illuminating collection of modern American verse. With its high-profile editorship and its generous embrace of American poetry in all its exuberant variety, the Best American Poetry series continues to be, as Robert Pinsky says, "as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be."

There's an extraordinary amount of wit and wordplay- outrageous puns, fractured homilies, garbled quotations, double entendres-in his short book. A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck recalls those planetarium shows that, in their vertiginous final minutes, whirl the audience through the cosmos.To say that Williamson is one of the three or four contemporary American masters of light verse may be a less grand pronouncement than it sounds, given how few serious poets these days would aspire to the title.Williamson's rhymes are likewise dexterous, with a number of unexpected combinations.and here and there he comes up with something so neatly preposterous that Byron might have been proud to claim it. The book holds up so well, richly repaying rereading, because there's a somber, eerie iciness at its core.Readers of A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck - this yes, marvelous book - are now and then disturbingly aware that behind its jokes is an apparition whose skeletal smile is no joke at all. -Brad Leithauser, NYRB "His verse is gripping and full of black comedy, sure to give fans of his work more of what they have come to love." The Midwest Book Review "Williamson's buoyant voice is constant - we're given a blast of amiable poetry on each page... playful and quick-witted." Poetry

Evocative poems and prose fragments about home, selected by one of the most celebrated poets of our time "This is a book of longing, yes, and also spiritual discernment, political awareness, historical memory, and deep intimacy."--Carolyn Forché In this poignant collection, Christian Wiman draws together one hundred evocative poems and prose fragments about home, exploring home's deep theological, literary, philosophical, historical, political, and social dimensions. Wiman calls home "a house, a country, a language, a love, a longing, a grief, a god." It's "a word that disperses into more definitions than one book can contain." The tensions between diffusion and concentration, roaming and rootedness, precarity and security are everywhere in this book, often in the same poem. Ranging from early modernism to the current moment, and from southern Africa to the Arctic Circle, the selections are as diverse as the poets included. Collectively they envision an imaginative home for even the most homeless of modern readers. Completed entirely during quarantine, amid the miseries of separation and isolation, the collection offers a powerful vision of home as both a place and a way.

"Primate Behavior is the product of a wild and exhilarating imagination, ranging wide across an abundant imaginary landscape. Sarah Lindsay writes of space migration and the cave paintings of 35,000 B.C. Her poems speak from the perspective of an embalmed mummy and detail the adventures and misadventures of nineteenth-century explorers. Lindsay investigates the world as no one has yet had the daring and inspiration to do, reanimating history and folk legend and setting in motion curious new worlds that speak eccentrically, but unmistakably to our own."--Back cover.