Other books that might interest you

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  The Fever Syndrome

  Alexis Zegerman

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  Professor Richard Myers, now in his 70s and suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease, is about to receive a lifetime achievement award for his work in the development of in-vitro fertilization. That calls for a family reunion, and given this high-functioning, dysfunctional family, there’s bound to be trouble ahead. As they gather, old resentments erupt as they fight over Richard’s legacy while facing another family member’s serious illness. 
   
  Incudes a conversation with playwright Alexis Zegerman. 
   
  This play is part of L.A. Theatre Works’ Relativity Series of science-themed plays. Lead funding for the Relativity Series is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, bridging science and the arts in the modern world. 
   
  Recorded at The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood in December 2023. 
   
  Directed by Sarah Drew 
  Producing Director: Susan Albert Loewenberg 
   
  An L.A. Theatre Works full cast recording, starring: 
   
  Hugo Armstrong as Professor Richard Myers 
  Seamus Dever as Thomas Myers 
  Sarah Drew as the voice of Karen 
  Patrick Heusinger as Anthony Myers 
  Kelly McCreary as Dot Myers-Cooper 
  Monica McSwain as Lily Cooper and Young Dot 
  Matthew Floyd Miller as Nate Cooper 
  Desean K. Terry as Phillip Tennyson 
  Joanne Whalley as Megan Myers. 
   
  Senior Producer: Anna Lyse Erikson 
  Prepared for audio by Mark Holden. 
  Recorded, designed, and mixed by Charles Carroll, and edited by Neil Wogensen for The Invisible Studios, West Hollywood. 
  Piano music and musical characters adapted and performed by Rusty Tinder, recorded by Charles Carroll, and Directed by Mark Holden. 
  Senior Radio Producer: Ronn Lipkin 
  Foley Artist: Stacey Martinez

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  Yellow Rain - Poems

  Mai Der Vang

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  In this staggering work of documentary and poetry, Mai Der Vang reopens a wrongdoing that deserves a new reckoning. As the US abandoned them at the end of the Vietnam War, many Hmong refugees recounted stories of a mysterious substance that fell from planes during their escape from Laos in the mid-1970s. This substance, known as "yellow rain," caused severe illnesses and thousands of deaths. These reports prompted an investigation into allegations that a chemical biological weapon had been used against the Hmong in breach of international treaties. A Cold War scandal erupted, wrapped in partisan debate around chemical arms development versus control. American scientists argued that yellow rain was the feces of honeybees defecating en masse—still held as the widely accepted explanation. The truth of what happened to the Hmong, to those who experienced and suffered yellow rain, has been ignored and discredited. 
   
   
   
  Integrating archival research and declassified documents, Vang calls out the erasure of a history, the silencing of a people who at the time lacked the capacity and resources to defend and represent themselves. In poems that sing and lament, that contend and question, Vang restores a vital narrative in danger of being lost, and brilliantly explores what it means to have access to the truth and how marginalized groups are often forbidden that access.

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  The Certainty Dream

  Kate Hall

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  Winner of the 2010 A. M. Klein Poetry Prize
     
  Shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize
     
  Descartes asked, How can I know that I am not now dreaming? The Certainty Dream poses similar questions through poetry, but without the trappings of traditional philosophy. Kate Hall’s bracingly immediate, insistently idiosyncratic debut collection lays bare thetricks and tools of her trade: a mynah bird perches in poems but 'stands for nightingale'; the poet’s antelope turns transparent; she dresses up her orange trees with bark and leaves. As the dream world and the waking world blur, the body and the dimensions it inhabits become a series of overlapping circles, all acting as containers for both knowledge and uncertainty. At times disarmingly plainspoken, at others, singing with lyric possibility, these poems make huge associative leaps. Taken together, they present the argument that to truly 'know' something, one must first recognize its traces in something else.
     
  'Kate Hall unites philosophy and wisdom – without forgetting the chipotle-lime mustard.'
     
  – Montreal Review of Books
     
  'The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes,the certainty of everyday life … Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.'
     
  – The Dominion
     
  'These are profoundly perfect poems.'
     
  – Eye Weekly
     
  'A whimsical and enlightening riff on the philosophic nature of knowing … Hall's imagination liberates language and subject at every blink.'
     
  – Winnipeg FreePress

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  44 Poems on Being with Each...

  Pádraig Ó Tuama

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  This celebratory anthology explores human connection through forty-four poems curated by Pádraig Ó Tuama, the host of On Being's Poetry Unbound podcast. 
   
   
   
  44 Poems on Being with Each Other is a new volume that offers immersive reflections on the human connection. With an observant eye, Pádraig Ó Tuama shares an enlightening meditation on each poem, revealing the ways we relate to each other, the world around us, and ourselves. Among the selections, Ó Tuama examines friendship and its loss through Langston Hughes's "I Loved My Friend," changing familial bonds in Rita Dove's "Eurydice, Turning," the relationship with the past in Mary Oliver's "The Uses of Sorrow," the power of declaration in Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me," and the necessity of connection to land in Joy Harjo's "Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings." 
   
   
   
  Blending humor with insight, tension with tenderness, complexity with care, 44 Poems on Being with Each Other articulates the power of poetry itself. Through careful and incisive readings, it illuminates aspects of the human condition, particularly the ways we are inextricably linked to each other, and provides inspiration for grounded self-reflection. It is an anthology that will delight listeners, just as Pádraig's podcast has done for millions around the world.

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  The Rupture Tense - Poems

  Jenny Xie

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  Shaped around moments of puncture and release, The Rupture Tense registers what leaks across the breached borders between past and future, background and foreground, silence and utterance. In polyphonic and formally restless sequences, Jenny Xie cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory  
  transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Across these poems, memory—historical, collective, personal—stains and erodes. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged. 
   
  The Rupture Tense begins with poems provoked by the photography of Li Zhensheng, whose negatives, hidden under his floorboards to avoid government seizure, provide one of the few surviving visual archives of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and concludes with an aching elegy for the poet’s grandmother, who took her own life shortly after the end  
  of the Revolution. This extraordinary collection records the aftershocks and long distances between those years and the present, echoing out toward the ongoing past and a trembling future.

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  Eye of the Beholder

  Anonymous

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  Luci Shaw is now 90 years old. The author of more than 35 collections of poetry and creative non-fiction over the last five decades, she describes her dedication to this art as a burden to "speak into a culture that finds it hard to listen." This collection of new poems—all composed over the last two years—is in many ways the culmination of a stunning career.
  
  
   
  
  
  The joy and responsibility of the poet is to focus on particulars within the universe, finding fragments of meaning that speak to the imagination. Ordinary things may reveal the extraordinary for those willing to take time to investigate and ponder. In this fresh collection of poems, Luci Shaw practices the art of seeing, and then writing what she sees, realizing that beauty is often focused in the Eye of the Beholder.
  
  
   
  
  Eye of the Beholder is meant to awaken in readers awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary. They will find in this collection a focus for meditation and be excited into their own imaginative writing.

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