My abuse as a child and as an adult and my fight against major depression.

I frantically called my therapist, Susan. I was in deep distress and felt positive Susan was the only one who could help me out of it. But it was the unsympathetic secretary who answered the phone, and she refused to do anything but take a message. I pleaded with her to put me through, but was told I should go straight to the hospital instead, and was asked to put my husband on the phone. While I waited for him to make her decision for her, I went into the bathroom and confronted my bottle of pills. On impulse, I swallowed thirty. That was Thursday. I woke up on Saturday night in the psychiatric ward of the Redland Hospital without any real memory of the last three days. But at least I lived through it. Tragically, severe depression and PTSD affect millions of people every day. Sharon survived with the love of her family and their unending devotion to her welfare. In this harrowing memoir of abuse, depression, and terror, there emerges a tale of love, redemption, and healing. Join Sharon and discover how to write your own version of The Perils of Sharon.

From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.

A searing sequence of poems about a daughter’s vision of a father’s illness and death—by the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called "a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down" (San Francisco Chronicle). The Father chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry. The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor—and without bitterness. The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old’s work find here their most powerful expression.

DIVThis remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom./divDIV /divDIVThis rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of best-selling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers./div

n Kelly DuMar's girl in tree bark, the past, especially the life of the family of origin, acts as a kind of sap that provides nutrients for the photosynthesis that charges the poems. But the poems send their salubrious nourishment down to the past, which becomes transformed with the poem-making. The effect of the past on the present, and vice-versa, is not static; it is a reciprocally kinetic symbiosis, played out in fluent, daring narratives, in language keen with insight and liquid with sumptuous musicality. In almost every poem, a coupling of devastation and healing works a remarkable magic. -- Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach

Portrays the life of the American poet who wrote the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

"The gift of Oliver's poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable" ( Miami Herald ). This has never been truer than in Long Life, a luminous collection of seventeen essays and ten poems. With the grace and precision that are the hallmarks of her work, Oliver shows us how writing "is a way of offering praise to the world" and suggests we see her poems as "little alleluias." Whether describing a goosefish stranded at low tide, the feeling of being baptized by the mist from a whale's blowhole, or the "connection between soul and landscape," Oliver invites readers to find themselves and their experiences at the center of her world. In Long Life she also speaks of poets and writers: Wordsworth's "whirlwind" of "beauty and strangeness"; Hawthorne's "sweet-tempered" side; and Emerson's belief that "a man's inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose." With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has created a breathtaking volume sure to add to her reputation as "one of our very best poets" (New York Times Book Review ).

"I wish we were back together for just one night . . . so I could push you out of my loftbed while you were sleeping." Satirical and sharp, downtown New York City performance artist Anita Liberty reinvents self-help as she skewers her ex-boyfriend in this hilarious, hip, and audaciously candid collection of advice, poems, and diary entries. "I thought you were a gifted and tortured artist. I was wrong. About the gifted part. Oh. And the artist part." From romantic bliss to brutal breakup, from heartache to healing, this fierce, funny, and ultimately liberating homage to being "dumped" rips off the stiff upper lip in favor of a red-hot therapy of wit, wisdom, rage, and redemption. And now, a few words from Anita Liberty . . . "COMPROMISE-- Lowering my standards. So you can meet them." "You're a bad habit. I want to kick you. Hard."

This monograph offers a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between the poetics and practice of Robert Burns and reevaluates the nature of his role in the history of Scots. By drawing on ideas from twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory, it seeks to transform the debate surrounding Burns’s language. Through a series of readings that explore the way in which Burns used and commented on the styles associated with different places, groups and genres, it demonstrates how languages, places, and the identities associated with both are, in Burns’s writing, subject to continual reinvention. In this respect, the study breaks with existing accounts of the subject, insofar as it presents Scots, English and the other languages used by Burns not as fixed, empirically-observable entities, but as ideas that were revised and remade through the poet’s work. Focusing on Burns’s poems, songs, letters, prefaces, and glossaries, the book pays special attention to the complex ways in which the author engaged with such issues as phonology, grammar, and the naming of languages. The Burns who emerges from this book is not the marginal figure of traditional accounts—an under-educated poet alienated from the philological mainstream—but rather a well-informed thinker who, more than any other contemporary writer, embodies the creative linguistic spirit of the eighteenth century.