Circling Back

“There was so much space.” These words epitomize ecologist Joe Truett's boyhood memories of the Angelina River valley in East Texas. Years and miles later, back home for the funeral of his grandfather, Truett began a long meditation on the world Corbett Graham had known and he himself had glimpsed, a now-vanished world where wild hogs and countless other animals rustled through the leaves, cows ate pinewoods grass instead of corn, oaks and hickories and longleaf pines were untouched by the corporate ax, and the river flowed freely. Truett's meditation resulted in this clear-sighted portrait of a place over time, its layers revealed by his love and care and curiosity.Truett celebrates his family's heritage and the unspoiled natural world of the Piney Woods without nostalgia. He recreates an older, simpler, more worthy age, but he knows that we have lost touch with it because we wanted to: he laments the loss but understands it. What makes his prose so moving and so redeeming is this precise combination of honesty and sorrow, overlaid by a quiet passion for both the natural and the human worlds.

Circling Back Home is the story of one woman, at a time when values of home, family, and care of the land seem increasingly absent, looking to her past to create a life of significance for her family. Her search takes her back to the prairie of her grandmothers, who survived personal hardships and lived off what the land provided. Lipp-Acord mourns the loss of one child and celebrates the birth of others, all while balancing her own desire to put down roots with her husband's life as an itinerant ranch hand. Written over ten years, these essays compose a picture of endurance and grace as the author addresses her history and finds her way home. "[Darcy] Lipp-Acord is one woman, but she tells a dozen stories, her ancestors' voices mingling with her own: the farmer's daughter, the Catholic woman, the wife, the mother, the artist. . . . Circling Back Home reflects the life of a ranch woman in all its prismatic variety."—Linda M. Hasselstrom

Julie Tieu, an exciting new and diverse voice in contemporary romance, returns with a hilarious and sexy new novel about colleagues who decide to take their relationship outside the office. Cadence Lim has transformed from behind-the-scenes number cruncher to an integral part of the sales team at Prism Realty. But despite moving up the corporate ladder, her complicated relationship with her estranged elderly father weighs heavily and she can’t seem to shake the desire for a new beginning. At least Cadence can always lean on her favorite co-worker and co-conspirator, Matt Escanilla. A top broker with an unsuccessful love life, the forever single Matt is constantly being nagged by his loving Filipino family to settle down. Their relationship takes a turn when a business trip lands them both in their hometown and Matt enlists Cadence as a pretend girlfriend for a family gathering. The new after-hours setting forces the two friends to see each other in a new light, and their previously buried feelings rise quickly to the surface. When competing promotions threaten to separate Cadence and Matt, these office besties must work together to round up their ambitions and families to pursue their overdue romance.

This work details a way to have fun with young people while giving them a lifelong tool for self-expression, physical and mental health, relaxation techniques, and improved focus.

Circling Brooks is a work of social and natural historical fiction, magic realism and zoomorphism, which depicts modern human society in the wilderness. In addition to narrating entertaining adventures, it questions stereotypic and personified descriptions of the landscape. Rather than merely recount human-projected thoughts and designs upon the earth, the book portrays the land shaping and, in somewhat wild form(s), literally transforming humans. It plays with the multifarious possibilities of the unleashed power of the land upon humanity. The novel is an account of many inter-linking journeys in the rough style of the epic. The nexus of all action is the re-invented village of “Brooks,” located on the north coast of Alaska between Barrow and Point Hope. From Brooks the characters wander across north central Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and eastern Siberia. Their paths wind south; cross, combine, split, and eventually curve back north to complete a mosaic of circling trails. Along the way these protagonists meet with many wild incidents and side-characters, including surly bears with grudges, an enraged cuckold, ghosts of dead caribou, projected vision through animal eyes, a maniacal captain of an illegal whaling ship, racist cult-missionaries, a whining phantom of a dead snowshoe hare, and their own persistent dreams.

One glaring lacuna in studies of Haitian Vodou is the scarcity of works exploring the connection between the religion and its main roots, traditional Yoruba religion. Discussions of Vodou very often seem to present the religion in vacuo, as a sui generis phenomenon that arose in Saint-Domingue and evolved in Haiti, with no antecedents. What is sorely needed then is more comparative studies of Haitian Vodou that would examine its connections to traditional Yoruba religion and thus illuminate certain aspects of its mythology, belief system, practices, and rituals. This book seeks to bridge these gaps. Vodou in the Haitian Experience studies comparatively the connections and relationships between Vodou and African traditional religions such as Yoruba religion and Egyptian religion. Such studies might enhance our understanding of the religion, and the connections between Africa and its Diaspora through shared religious patterns and practices. The general reader should be mindful of the transnational and transcultural perspectives of Vodou, as well as the cultural, socio-economic, and political context which gave birth to different visions and ideas of Vodou. The chapters in this collection tell a story about the dynamics of the Vodou faith and the rich ways Vodou has molded the Haitian narrative and psyche. The contributors of this book examine this constructed narrative from a multicultural voice that engages critically the discipline of ethnomusicology, drama, performance, art, anthropology, ethnography, economics, literature, intellectual history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and theology. Vodou is also studied from multiple theoretical approaches including queer, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, postcolonial criticism, postmodernism, and psychoanalysis.

One of our most important contemporary critics, Marjorie Perloff has been a widely published and influential reviewer, especially of poetry and poetics, for over fifty years. Circling the Canon, Volume I covers roughly the first half of Perloff’s career, beginning with her first ever review, on Anthony Hecht’s The Hard Hours. The reviews in this volume, culled from a wide range of scholarly journals, literary reviews, and national magazines, trace the evolution of poetry in the mid- to late twentieth century as well as the evolution of Perloff as a critic. Many of the authors whose works are reviewed in this volume are major figures, such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath, and Frank O’Hara. Others, including Mona Van Duyn and Richard Hugo, were widely praised in their day but are now all but forgotten. Still others—David Antin, Edward Dorn, or the Language poets—exemplify an avant-garde that was to come into its own.

It’s not too late to learn new math tricks—and help kids learn them, too! Teaching Your Kids New Math, Grades 6-8, For Dummies teaches you the new standard way of teaching kids math. It’s all about thinking through how to solve problems and using strategies, rather than just memorizing the procedures. In this book, parents, guardians, and tutors will learn how to use these methods and standards to effectively teach kids Common Core math for grades 6-8. Teaching Your Kids New Math, Grades 6-8, For Dummies shows you how schools are teaching kids math these days, and gives you tools to support kids through the homework and test prep process. You’ll love this book’s clear explanations and examples organized by grade level. With Teaching Your Kids New Math, Grades 6-8, For Dummies?? you’ll also get access to online tools, including dozens of math worksheets for additional support. Learn how to teach 6th through 8th grade math according to the Common Core Discover the new methods and formulas that are standard for math instruction Get best teaching practices, example problems, and tips about common math pitfalls Help your kids with math homework and enhance the homeschool journey This is the perfect Dummies guide for anyone who needs guidance on how to teach kids math using new methods and concepts—they’re different from what we learned in school! Future math teachers will also love this user-friendly guide to middle-grade math.