Looking In The Dark

Our identity can be a confusing and mysterious area to explore, and even though the world expects us to figure out who we are and get our lives together, the truth is, that we can't always pick a category for ourselves, and why should we? It can be difficult to find the right words to explain your existence, so Simar Bhogal, decides to look where no one else is, in the dark. 'looking in the dark.' is a blackout poetry book that explores identity in a personal, cultural and global context through an amalgamation of writing and art.

Ira Ellingswortha pawn in the neoconservative movement under the tutelage of his boss, Fred Rollins, a born-again evangelical Christian and archconservativerealizes that this is not the destiny he wanted for himself. As an assistant district attorney, he comes face-to-face with the unholy trinity of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act of 2007. To make matters worse, he is proselytized to become a member of the Christian Zionist movement, which he eventually finds to be hypocritical. He and his comrade-in-arms Carol Langley do battle against these forces, but they realize that they are outmatched. Seeking a new direction, Ira and Carol get hired by Roberto Sanchez, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and they blossom as civil rights lawyers. Ira now fights against everything that Fred Rollins stands for, and he starts to bring justice back from near annihilation. The national intelligence agencies and their ever-expanding surveillance powers receive their first reality check compliments of the ACLU, and Ira becomes an unlikely hero. He then undergoes a spiritual transformation as he breaks free from the power-obsessed neoconservative world and sees that the country is finally moving in a new direction.

Sam Michael is having bad dreams; his sleep has been agitated and interrupted in the weeks leading up to his fiftieth birthday. On that day, however, tragedy strikes, and a freak accident leaves Sam in a comatose state. To the people who love him, he sleeps peacefully. For Sam, the state of unconsciousness is anything but restful. Sam is the victim of a relentless incubus. This monstrous creature forces Sams dreaming mind into a parallel universe. He may have fallen into a coma at the age of fifty in 1995, but his mind has been transported to Vietnam in 1965. Sam must now survive a horrific war he thought he once escaped; worse, in the dream, he is wounded. In order to awaken and return home, Sam must complete an unknown mission. But the shock of being caught up in this war leaves him spinning, however, and he feels unable to finish his task. A journey must be taken, a place discovered, and a mystery solved. The ruthless incubus would keep Sam in its power forever, but Sams life is in his grasp, if only he can escape the war a second time.

It is the hope of both authors that everyone who reads this book may relate personally, in some way, to some of the poems contained in this book, and know that they are not alone in their feelings. Whether good feelings, or bad, the intent of this book of poetry is to let others know that their feelings are genuine, real, and they are not alone in the way they perceive any given situation. That there are others who share the same feelings that they do; and for better or worse, no one has to endure or suffer alone, nor keep quiet their feelings of success and victory. We all share common threads of emotions and are all lifted up by hearing of someone elses experiences; both successes and failures. Each of us has something to share, something we can relate to, and something of ourselves that we can pass along to others to make the road they are traveling on a little smoother than the person who went before them. We all indeed have something to share with each other. We all indeed have knowledge that someone can benefit from hearing about. It is to that end that we have composed this book of poetry and stand-alone thoughts; that someones day may be a little bit brighter, just knowing that they are not alone in the way they are thinking or feeling.

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world. There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties. There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read. And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side. Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading? The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.

'On a dark night a person searches on the brightly-lit ground under a lamp-post. A passer-by asks - For what are you searching? The person says - For the keys to my house. The passer-by says - Is this where you lost them? The person says - No I lost them in the dark, but this is where the light is.' A retired academic and writer lies in a New York hospital bed. He has come there from his home in London to appear as a pundit on television, only to be knocked down by a car. Formerly an anthropologist, he is now tired of looking for order and reason where he can see none. His views on human nature and war are provocative and he has begun to find himself in demand. The forced inactivity allows him to reflect on the course of his life - the work he has done, the women he has known - and the characters from it begin to gather him: his first wife Valerie, his new wife Veronica, his son Adam. He considers his first marriage and the curious version of fidelity they evolved, his days of teaching at Oxford, and the trip to Iran that saw him return with Nadia, a young girl whom he assists in escaping to a different life in England. Witty, philosophical, and wise, Nicholas Mosley's latest novel is a timely portrait of one man's attempt to bring order to his disordered existence.

On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. She could not give the authorities any information about why she was the only survivor and everyone else was lying around in hacked-up pieces. Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest. Written with a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Roberta's two stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz -- painfully but inevitably converge in a surprising denouement in a nightmarish Dreamland in the Nevada desert. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, and resonant with humanity, propelled by all the narrative power of a superior thriller and burnished by the author's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.

A rip-roaring pirate romance and mystery In a world where infants with magical powers are torn from their parents to be raised by the mysterious and powerful Danisoba, who have a monopoly on magic, Kestrel has managed to keep her abilities concealed—and herself free. First hiding in back alleys as a street urchin, she hid when they killed her parents, and then served as a young tavern maid before escaping to sea, where magic is cancelled by water. Now an adult, as the quartermaster of a pirate ship, Kestrel loves the freedom of living on the seas. But her way of life could end if anyone on board learns her closely guarded secret—that she has magical control over the wind. One day a black ship appears, and her life changes. Its captain is a handsome rogue of whom Kestrel is strangely, constantly aware. When Kestrel's captain is led into a trap and is arrested, she gathers her crew and sets sail in relentless pursuit. . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.