Entering The Real World Vcca Poets On Mt San Angelo

Bloom in Reverse chronicles the aftermath of a friend's suicide and the end of a turbulent relationship, working through devastation and loss while on a search for solace that spans from local bars to online dating and beyond to ultimately find true connection and sustaining love. Things move backwards, from death to life, like a reverse time-lapse video of a dead flower morphing from brittle, scorched entity to floral glory to nacsent bud. The poems seek to find those places where the natural world connects to and informs experiences at the core of human relationships, and at times call upon principles and theories from physics and mathematics to describe the complexities of love and loss. It's a book where grief, melancholy, heartbreak, and disillusionment intersect with urban romanticism, hope, possibility, and love. Bloom is all of it, the terrible and the beautiful.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Set mid-to-late 20th century (with the heart of the book set in the 1950s and '60s), MY FATHER'S EYES is a loving daughter's memoir of a family coming to terms with a legacy of blindness, and a father's heroic efforts to secure independence and dignity. "Not many pages into this gloriously moving book, a feeling begins to grow that it would have been a humbling yet exquisite experience to have sat and talked with Biagio John Bonina. What his daughter Mary Bonina has given us is a solid and lasting portrait of a man who was simple and complicated. (That is not a contradiction once you come to know him.)... America is a country of grand men and women who live on a modest scale, and no one fits that category more than he does. Once his eyes began to fail him, he lived even more for his family and its welfare and his efforts and work make him in my mind, the kind of real hero we fail to glorify anymore. So enter this book and come to know her father and his dedicated overwhelmingly loyal daughter, as well as a large stage of family members and friends who are unforgettable and insanely knowable and human." Edward P. Jones "Mary Bonina casts her considerable spell with exquisite sentences and unerring evocative details. She is a writer of inordinate compassion, formidable intelligence, and unflinching honesty. MY FATHER'S EYES documents a family's coming to grips with the legacy of blindness, a daughter's unflagging allegiance to her father, and one man's heroic determination to live a life of independence and quiet dignity despite obstacles that would crush the strongest of us. The book is an inspiration. When I finished reading it, I walked around for days seeing the world through its lens. Yes, it's that good. It's that important." John Dufresne "Packard. Record player. Telephone party line. Fallout shelter. Holy Ghost. These and other blasts from the past make up the world of this beautiful, clear-eyed memoir that reads like a novel. It's partly the story of a girl who loved words on her way to becoming a writer. Of all the words in her universe, the most important were eyes and seeing, for this was a girl growing up with a beloved father going blind. Becoming his guide and his eyes, she becomes herself. And what a character he is We come to know him as if we're all his children, one minute consumed with terror at the dangers he faces, and the next minute awed by his courage, and the next exasperated by his human flaws. And ultimately, we see and feel for ourselves what his daughter means when she says, 'I know about love from being my father's eyes.'" Ellen Cooney"

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Poetry. The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 sees Andrea Carter Brown gathering her work into one devastating bouquet of terror, survival, grief, and recovery. From stark moment-to-moment narrative of the flight from her apartment one block from the Towers, through the poems of loss and recovery, her honesty refuses simple answers and refuses to prettify. Bracketed by poems that celebrate the beauty of New York and of the life that followed, Brown pulls us through the arteries of trauma to a wise and astonished consciousness of what it means to heal. To sing again.

An Iraq war comedy that “is everything that terrible conflict was not: beautifully planned and perfectly executed; funny and smart and lyrical; a triumph” (Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life). Fobbit ’fä-bit, noun. Definition: A US soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2011). Pejorative. In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit, a New York Times Notable Book, takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield—where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like a desk job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy. Darkly humorous and based on the author’s own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war. “This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Poetry. "CONVERSATIONS DURING SLEEP feels like a logbook of gutsy revelations, transporting us to a territory both ethereal and earthy. We care about the lives that nudge us awake in this dark luminosity, a heartfelt journey we don't want to miss" -Yusef Komunyakaa.