Other books that might interest you

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  The Hayflick Limit

  Matthew Tierney

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  Shortlisted for the 2010 Trillium Book Award for Poetry
   
  To be human is to cope with knowing. In the early sixties, Leonard Hayflick determined that healthy cells can divide only a finite number of times. Known as the Hayflick Limit, the law sets an unsurpassable lifespan for our species at just over 120 years.
   
  The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person?
   
  Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time. With demotic verve and a humming line, he gives voice to a range of characters who scrape out meaning in a carnivalesque universe that has birthed black holes and Warner Bros. cartoons, murky market economies, murkier quantum laws, Vincent Price, Molotov cocktails, seedless grapes, Area 51 and competing Theories of Everything.
   
  ‘The most thoroughly engaged and inventive book of poetry I have read in a long, long time. Brimming with hi-lo wit, keenly apprised and settled with cultured repose, Matthew Tierney takes The HayflickLimit to the hoop.’ – David McGimpsey
   
  ‘Matthew Tierney writes poems like a mad boy scientist. His lines manage to blur the border between nomenclature and everyday insight ... Call it science fiction for the melancholic.’
   
  – Eye Weekly

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  Next Door to the Dead - Poems

  Kathleen Driskell

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  “A collection of poems that are bold, inviting, charming, different, humorous, and irreverent. Often, they slip the bonds of common expectation.” —Northern Kentucky Tribune 
   
  When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she’s gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet—whose last book, Seed Across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation—lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet’s fascination with the “neighbors” brings the burial ground back to life. 
   
  Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These “neighbors,” with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones. 
   
  Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell’s poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us. 
   
  “Driskell has written her path to the Kentuckian sublime.” —Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered

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  The Monster Trilogy

  RM Vaughan

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  Demons, ogres, werewolves – men have all the fun. Not here. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan's The Monster Trilogy turns the tables and offers up three monstrously evil women in three explosive monologues.
   
  In The Susan Smith Tapes, the infamous young mother who drowned her three sons tries to recapture the public's attention by auditioning for talk shows from her prison cell. In A Visitation by Saint Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance, we meet a middle-aged police officer whose world view is warped by her obsession with race, bloodlines and genetic determinism. And Dead Teenagers introduces us to the Reverend, a frustrated cleric unhealthily addicted to the spectacle of large funerals for murdered children.
   
  These monologues – all performed at Rhubarb! festivals and all critically acclaimed – create a vivid triptych that considers the notion of monstrosity from three very distinct perspectives.
   
  'RM Vaughan writes like a sailor with a PhD and a broken heart.' – Daniel MacIvor

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  What They Say About You

  Eddie Gibbons

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  Eddie Gibbons' fourth full length collection, WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT YOU, is a poetry book like no other.Playful, thoughtful, inventive, and much larger than your average slim volume What They Say About You was shortlised in poetry for Scottish Book of the Year.Eddie Gibbons was born in Liverpool, but lives in Scotland. He was a winner at the Inaugural Edwin Morgan poetry prize at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2008.The poetry in What They Say About You covers love, family life, glorious wordplay and celebrations of Eddie's beloved Liverpool Football Club.

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  The Cherry Orchard - Full Text...

  Anton Chekhov

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  The NHB Drama Classics series presents the world's greatest plays in affordable, highly readable editions for students, actors and theatregoers. The hallmarks of the series are accessible introductions (focussing on the play's theatrical and historical background, together with an author biography, key dates and suggestions for further reading) and the complete text, uncluttered with footnotes. The translations, by leading experts in the field, are accurate and above all actable. The editions of English-language plays include a glossary of unusual words and phrases to aid understanding.
  The Cherry Orchard is Chekhov's classic tragicomedy, translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.
  Ranevskaya can no longer afford to keep her childhood home with its beautiful but barren cherry orchard. She rejects the compromise offered by Lopakhin, a local businessman, to cut down the orchard and sell the land for holiday homes. Eventually Ranevskaya and her family are forced to leave the estate which Lopakhin has now bought.

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  The Heiress of Water - A Novel

  Sandra Rodriguez Barron

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  When young Monica Winters Borrero loses her luminous mother in an accident at sea, she is exiled from the tropical paradise that was her home. Grieving and cut off from a life among El Salvador's elite, Monica and her American father move to Connecticut, vowing never to look back.Years later, an intriguing stranger, who has endured a terrible loss of his own, enters Monica's life, bearing an unusual request. Monica is propelled back to her lost world, retracing the shadowy last days of her mother, a marine scientist who had been on the brink of understanding the therapeutic applications of a rare, venomous sea creature. Now, her research is being corrupted by a secret clinic that claims the power to restore consciousness to the comatose.What Monica discovers will shatter the family's delicate truce with the past, and compel everyone involved to challenge their deepest notions of what it means to be alive. Atmospheric, thought-provoking, and timely. The Heiress of Water is a stunning parable of paradise lost and found.

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