Publisher: Good Press
McKay's 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance and his novel Home To Harlem was a watershed contribution to its fiction. Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
This volume of poetry brings together poems throughout history with very special women. The relationship with our Mother is one of the most powerful many of us will ever feel. It rivals those with our children and partners in a way that both permeates and challenges how and on what terms we live our lives. A woman giving birth is not only bringing life into the World, she is doing so, usually, at great pain to herself. The fact that this is transformed within minutes of birth to a deep, unconditional love is truly beautiful. Whatever the future brings for Mother or child that bond will hold. The first attempts at language by babies is usually 'muh' or 'ma' - a universal sound for Mother. In every race, culture and domain Mothers are seen as both a symbol and living emblem of love and nurture, of comfort and safety. As we grow older that relationship changes but on a fundamental level remains giving, unconditional and unequivocal. As we become parents ourselves that circle of experience completes a full turn. For poets through time this unique and fulfilling relationship has enabled some of the greatest verse to be written by some of our most famed poets from Wordsworth to Whitman to Tennyson and many, many others. We hope this experience of listening to these carefully chosen words will help you reflect and further enjoy the experience that a Mother's love has brought to your life. Their devotion to ours ensures ours to theirs. Whilst we celebrate Mother's Day once a year, every day is their day.Show book
Bessie's Resurrection gives voice to Richard Wright's fictional character Bessie Mears from his novel Native Son (1940). These poems offer Bessie room to articulte her experiences as an African American woman and how she suffes in her unenviable position, powerless and unseen. Here, Bessie's fictive character is self actualized by two historical African American trailblazers: Bessie Coleman and Bessie Smith who lived during the same time period when Bessie's story takes place. These poems, which reimagine their lives, are a microcosim of the lived experiences of African American women who face violence, limitations and challenges, Their voices and bodies are resurrected to articulate their ideas of worth to claim a space to speak not only for themselves but also for their sisters who are voiceless. Their lives become three songs which are analogous to the sections in Wright's novel: Fear, Flight and Fate. While Bessie Mears supplies the soundtrack to Bigger's story, it is Bessie Smith's blues sung by Colie Aziza which serve as the soundtrack for Bessie's Resurrection. This collection of poems, written for all three Bessie's, honors Black women as the necessary backbone to the fight against their voices and their bodies being buried alive.Show book
When Heaven Intervenes in the World of Men (Author's Narration) A prophetic voice for our age, A LeRoy crafts magical tales steeped in Biblical themes. The books in this collection combine otherworldly visions, leaps through time and space, and face-to-face encounters with the Almighty Himself. But those encounters are made possible only by the loving interventions of Jesus, embodying his role as Friend and Intercessor before the throne of God. If you love the imaginings of C.S. Lewis, these stories will call to your heart. 1. The Christmas Tree A tree is torn from his forest home and all that he loves. All seems lost, until a little boy takes up his cause. In the words of one reviewer, this story "packs more punch than 12 volumes of theological discourse" as LeRoy combines the traditional Christmas story with themes of death and resurrection, otherworldly revelation, and courage led by divine calling. 2. The Prince's Oath In this traditional Afghan tale, love will undergo many trials with God's help, even if it comes in the form of a cheeky little mouse! 3. Obama's Dream About to hand over the keys of empire to Donald Trump, Obama's dreams are troubled. But Heaven intervenes with two great angels sent to redeem him. That's if they can overcome Satan's campaign of accusation! “Profound tales of hope that demand you listen to their wisdom.“ Andrea L. Stoeckel, Rockinrev Review "I recommend the audio adaptations read by the very talented author and actor, Abdiel LeRoy." William Mortensen Vaughan "LeRoy has an active and practical understanding of the Christian Faith, and he is a gifted writer of parables that illustrate this." Landon Schultz, pastorShow book
In a strange twist of kismet, Remica Bingham-Risher's paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Lee Fowlkes, is interviewed for the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives in Petersburg, Virginia in 1937, and her maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, is sent to Petersburg in 1941, diagnosed with "water on the brain"—postpartum depression being an ongoing mystery—nine days after birthing her first child. Braiding meticulous archival research with Womanist scholarship and her hallmark lyrical precision, Bingham-Risher's latest collection of poems treads the murky waters of race, lineage, faith, mental health, women's rights, and the violent reckoning that inhabits the discrepancy between lived versus textbook history, asking: What do we inherit when trauma is at the core of our fractured living? Utilizing primary and secondary sources, Bingham-Risher weaves together a richly textured vision of her foremothers' everyday and exceptional living: two very different women at opposite ends of their lives, converging upon the same space and time. The lives these women inhabit and generations they fostered add infinite layers to the fabric of the American tapestry. Room Swept Home serves as a gloriously rendered portrait of all that is held in the line between the private and public, the investigative and generative, the self and those who came before us.Show book
National Book Award winner Paul Monette’s acclaimed first book of poetryOriginally published in 1975, The Carpenter at the Asylum was Monette’s first literary success. In this collection of poems, he writes with playfulness and candor of everything from fairy tales to the change of seasons. “All things glitter like fresh milk,” he writes in one poem. And indeed, these works pull a sparklingly strange beauty from everyday objects and experiences.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Paul Monette including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the Paul Monette papers of the UCLA Library Special Collections.Show book
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.Show book
