“A japa mala of an ordinary life, 108 beads woven around a thread of thoughtful awareness of the creator and all creatures great and small” This is the third, enlarged, edition of a collection of poems celebrating epiphanic moments that illumined the author’s life. Readers have greatly liked the previous editions for their simple, straightforward, giving impulse to share the ordinary day to day things that made up the kaleidoscope of an obviously much cherished life journey, for its sensitive sublimation of an individual experience to a more universally shared humanity. The collection stands out for its portrayal of nature and human relations and the close bonds between nature and man, resting on a perceptible substratum of sensitive thoughtfulness and spirituality.

Each of us has a lifetime in which to discover our way to belong within our particular experience of times and events. Instead of an operating manual, our families and cultures give us expectations for who we are and what is our place in the world. This is the story of my journey into the calling of motherhood that I did not understand and struggled to reject. Conscientious wrestling with the experiences of motherhood eventually taught me how entangled love and anger can be and how suffering is inseparable from both. Finally a deeper call to love confronted me.

Despite his importance and influence, jazz musician, educator, and community leader Horace Tapscott remains relatively unknown to most Americans. In Songs of the Unsung Tapscott shares his life story, recalling his childhood in Houston, moving with his family to Los Angeles in 1943, learning music, and his early professional career. He describes forming the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra in 1961 and later the Union of God's Musicians and Artists Ascension to preserve African American music and serve the community. Tapscott also recounts his interactions with the Black Panthers and law enforcement, the Watts riots, his work in Hollywood movie studios, and stories about his famous musician-activist friends. Songs of the Unsung is the captivating story of one of America’s most unassuming heroes as well as the story of L.A.'s cultural and political evolution over the last half of the twentieth century.

In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music–heard, imagined, or remembered–to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes,' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.