Open Eye Open Heart

Selected works reveal the modern poet's thoughts on personal, social and political concerns.

Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry perfected between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by masters like Basho, Buson, and Issa. Haiku illuminate what is happening in this place at this moment. They are short, concise, immediate, created out of direct experience. My Haiku are an invitation to share wondrous, feeling encounters I have with Nature, and with my nature. Two Sagas The haiku are followed by two sagas. These are derivatives of haiku. They are palpable, direct exposures of my heart made up of immediate experience.

The long-awaited memoir by Canada’s most celebrated Olympian and advocate for mental health. From one of Canada’s most decorated Olympians comes a raw but life-affirming story of one woman’s struggle with depression. In 2006, when Clara Hughes stepped onto the Olympic podium in Torino, Italy, she became the first and only athlete ever to win multiple medals in both Summer and Winter Games. Four years later, she was proud to carry the Canadian flag at the head of the Canadian team as they participated in the opening ceremony of the Vancouver Olympic Winter Games. But there’s another story behind her celebrated career as an athlete, behind her signature billboard smile. While most professional athletes devote their entire lives to training, Clara spent her teenage years using drugs and drinking to escape the stifling home life her alcoholic father had created in Elmwood, Winnipeg. She was headed nowhere fast when, at sixteen, she watched transfixed in her living room as gold medal speed skater Gaétan Boucher effortlessly raced in the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Dreaming of one day competing herself, Clara channeled her anger, frustration, and raw ambition into the endurance sports of speed skating and cycling. By 2010, she had become a six-time Olympic medalist. But after more than a decade in the gruelling world of professional sports that stripped away her confidence and bruised her body, Clara began to realize that her physical extremes, her emotional setbacks, and her partying habits were masking a severe depression. After winning bronze in the last speed skating race of her career, she decided to retire from that sport, determined to repair herself. She has emerged as one of our most committed humanitarians, advocating for a variety of social causes both in Canada and around the world. In 2010, she became national spokesperson for Bell Canada’s Let’s Talk campaign in support of mental health awareness, using her Olympic standing to share the positive message of the power of forgiveness. Told with honesty and passion, Open Heart, Open Mind is Clara’s personal journey through physical and mental pain to a life where love and understanding can thrive. This revelatory and inspiring story will touch the hearts of all Canadians.

A profoundly and unexpectedly intimate, deeply affecting summing up of life so far, from one of the most cherished moral voices of our time. Eighty-two years old, facing emergency heart surgery and his own mortality, Elie Wiesel reflects back on his life. Emotions, images, faces, and questions flash through his mind. His family before and during the unspeakable Event. The gifts of marriage, children, and grandchildren that followed. In his writing, in his teaching, in his public life, has he done enough for memory and for the survivors? His ongoing questioning of God—where has it led? Is there hope for mankind? The world’s tireless ambassador of tolerance and justice gives us a luminous account of hope and despair, an exploration of the love, regrets, and abiding faith of a remarkable man. Translated from the French by Marion Wiesel

When Neugeboren discovered he needed emergency bypass surgery, he embarked on a journey that would just begin on the operating table. Clear, compelling, comic, and inspiring, "Open Heart" is a memoir every patient, doctor, and care provider will want to read.

In The Open-Heart Open-Mind Recovery Concept, Twelve Suggestions to Freedom and Wholeness for Survivors of Parental Narcissistic Abuse, the author describes her own journey of recovery from the lifelong misery and twisted reality as an adult child of narcissists. Through the Twelve Suggestions, she marks a path of healing from parental narcissistic abuse trauma, that allowed her to discover her authentic self, and emerge as the adult she is meant to be.