A View from the Heights, Vol. 1: Daily Meditations from God's Word

Lasater, Frank E

Paloma Press

A View from the Heights: Daily Meditations from God's Word

Frank E. Lasater, Jr.

What does God know?

Frank E Lasater

CLOSE APART by Robert Cowan Published by Paloma Press ISBN: 978-1-7323025-0-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018942360 From Donna Masini, author of 4:30 Movie (Norton), "Close Apart begins on a subway, in a community of passengers, with a child in distress, a city in blackout. It's a generous, deeply empathetic book filled with characters, stories and a remarkable tenderness--for the suffering and vulnerability of children, for the flawed adults they become. A father's delight in his daughter's wacky imagination finds a surprising echo in Cowan's brainy, sophisticated and witty speaker who can move from quantity theory to all manner of magical thinking and numerical rationalization in his restless questions, his attempts to make sense of a chaotic and troubling world." Robert Cowan is a literature professor and dean at the City University of New York. He's also the author of The Indo- German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885 (Camden House, 2010) and Teaching Double Negatives: Disadvantage and Dissent at Community College (Peter Lang, 2018). This is his first collection of poetry.

Close Apart

Literature & Fiction

Cowan, Robert

Poetry

“…where are the moments of joy, of beauty, of grace within this doomsday path humans are on? From where or how do we come up with reasons that make it worthwhile to continue living? To rush out of our beds to greet the day? To smile? To laugh? Well, for me, these moments would occur through the positive interactions made possible by love and respect for other people, creatures and the environment…” (Eileen R. Tabios)
In HUMANITY, we are presented with humanity’s explorations, often struggles, with itself in a variety of contexts. From the anthology’s contributors—poets, environmental advocates, an ethnomusicologist, a physician, an ethnoecologist, a music minister, a clergywoman, a fictionist, and multiculturalists—we glimpse an overall picture of strength and fragility, of empathy, and myriad hopes. #humanitytheanthology #humanity
Advance words: “The writings in Humanity are global in scope; but rather than explicating or attempting to impose a global system or authoritarian state upon the reader, these works run on thoughtful exploration of human feeling, experience, and action. Here you will find encounters between profoundly different cultures, the authors working their way through threads of humanity or animality and mythology like fibers twisted in varied textures and hues throughout a shawl. Here you will find views into personal experiences that have shaped each writer, sometimes causing pain, grief, anger, or wonder. In a world where humans are increasingly becoming aware of their own destructive impulses, a sense of urgency, though sometimes subtle, lies behind the lines. What, in this human condition, is worthwhile? The writers burrow deeply into memories, some following clues toward connection and empathy—others seeking clarity of thought and action—because if anything is clearer now than ever before, it’s that consequences can and will happen, and change is required; resistance cannot be shallow, but depends on both openness and carefully thought-out acts that will carry us forward with awareness of “history and all its complex entanglements,” as well as its possible futures. —Jean Vengua, author of Prau and Corporeal

Humanity: An Anthology, Volume 1

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Praise for The Good Mother of Marseille: "A veritable bouillabaisse of a novel, simmering with intrigue and steaming with surprises." --Lorea Canales, author of Becoming Marta and Los Perros"A remarkable work of imagination, a debut novel that not only introduces us to a gifted writer of fiction, but offers a beguiling glimpse into the zeitgeist of a generation's appetite for the exotic and the mysterious. In the Hemingway tradition, its many linked stories gel into one compelling story of Americans abroad. Shade's sensitivity toward his characters is infectious, and, quite frankly, unforgettable." --Philip Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author most recently of Luxury and The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse"Marseille with its hot dangerous streets, its bars, and beautiful churches becomes a character in this fresh and original novel by Christopher X. Shade. Here we glimpse anew intriguing and moving facets of human nature so skillfully and believably portrayed." --Sheila Kohler, author of 13 books, most recently a memoir, Once We Were Sisters"Well-developed characters, finding themselves in a landscape that is both beautiful and troubling, come to Marseille in search of many things--a chance to prove themselves, an adventure, a last hurrah. But what they find within is deeply more meaningful and surprising." --Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels and The Living Infinite"The Good Mother of Marseille is a beautiful and memorable debut, a melancholy tale of both lost and found, a love letter to the night-lights of France, a movable feast for this 21st century." --Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' BridlesMore Praise at christopherxshade.com. One of Big Other's "Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2019"Book Synopsis: In Christopher X. Shade's The Good Mother of Marseille, it's the summer of 2013, in the year of Marseille's designation as the European Capital of Culture. Readers get a taste of this dangerous, impoverished yet seductive port city of France as they follow the interwoven stories of Americans who have come to wander and sightsee. No mie, an anthropology student, wants to make the gritty graffiti-covered neighborhood of Cours Julien her home, but she's running out of time, money, and her university sponsor's patience.No mie watches over Corey, from New Jersey, who is an earlier version of her: also an anthropology student, he's just getting started. But what he wants is very different. He searches the Marseille streets for what he needs from someone to love. In the old port, the wife of a small-town Alabama couple presses to see all the sights while her husband is losing his vision to an eye disease. No mie intersects with everyone--has she stolen their passports? A Colorado man with late-stage cancer and fear of the unexpected falls in love with a French woman he meets at a caf on the old port. In Marseille and then in Paris, a woman helps her journalist husband figure out what is happening in his head as he experiences a peculiar stress disorder. Hovering on the fringe are the Marseillais, the shopkeepers, artists, caf waiters. Who among them will save No mie?To the rhythm of European street life, each American puts a Marseille experience in the context of their own histories. It's a love letter to the turbulence of Marseille, and to the turbulence to be found under the surface of each of us, the pounding hearts and jarring fears.

The Good Mother of Marseille

Shade, Christopher X.

United States

Pagpag is a provocation, connoting both debris and creative refashioning of memory fragments from the Marcos dictatorship--a legacy that, in the words of Philippine nationalist historian Renato Constantino, remains ruefully "a continuing past," especially in today's Duterteland. Here, the remains of the regime, like rescued reminiscences of an era preferred forgotten but not lost are gathered anew in a compelling telling, this time from the lens of a diasporic exile. In this volume, Eileen Tabios captures in scintillating prose the sights, smells, sounds, and ghostly hauntings of that era and offers back to the homeland, as in the gift of a proverbial balikbayan box, her reflections both heartfelt and wrenching. --Lily A. Mendoza, Executive Director, Center for Babaylan Studies, Associate Professor in Culture and Communication, Oakland University, and author of Between the Homeland and the Diaspora: The Politics of Theorizing Filipino and Filipino American Identities

Pagpag: The Dictator's Aftermath in the Diaspora

Tabios, Eileen R.

DIASPORA VOLUME L by Ivy Alvarez is part of a multivolume work of 19 letters based on the Filipino alphabet. Innovative in scope and approach, the series engages Filipino idioms, cycling through the free verse poem, and prose poem forms. Ivy Alvarez is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, New Zealand Poetry Society's editor for a fine line magazine, and an international editor for the first NZ/Aotearoa edition of Atlanta Review. Born in the Philippines, Ivy Alvarez grew up in Tasmania, Australia. Having lived in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, she lived almost ten years in Cardiff, Wales, before arriving in Auckland, New Zealand in 2014.

Diaspora Volume L

Alvarez, Ivy

"At the heart of Rob Cowan's hybrid new book Elsewhen is the void, which functions--in the deadpan tongue-in-cheek tone that animates this collection--as a kind of simultaneous self portrait and ars poetica. Cowan's meditations arise out of an almost jovial irony and despair as the speaker in these poems leaps between raunch and high abstraction, sampling logos, allegory, politics, wordplay, philosophy, and history. These poems destabilize convention as they carry us down unexpected detours, from the Belt Parkway to a collection of bardos and other liminal states." --Catherine Barnett "Robert Cowan's collection Elsewhen is a delight of culture, sharpness and emotions. A patchwork of scenes, places and peoples, a transparency of history and histories, Elsewhen is a refreshing and necessary read, bathed in the warm light of a long-awaited humanistic sunrise." --Sébastien Doubinsky "If the poetry of wit were ever to make a comeback in our age of winsome elegy and compulsory subversion, Robert Cowan would be its maestro. Not here the sex and flowers sopping up the poetic page or the "something kinda bad happened to me once" that earned James Tate's contempt. Cowan steps up in his second collection with poems that are fresh and wide-ranging, ever-attentive to the world around him and executed in a quick-stepping idiom he owns. Here you will find poems that vibrate with spot-on observation and natural sophistication that pay readers the compliment of recognizing their own acuity and amplifying their imaginations." --David Rigsbee

Elsewhen: pieces

Glimpses: A Poetic Memoir (Through the MDR Generator) began as a daily meditation practice of reading a poetic line from Eileen Tabios' Murder, Death, Resurrection, and then allowing the heart's response to flow without censorship. The meditations offer us a glimpse of Leny's life-long reflections on love, history, decolonization, healing trauma, finding belonging and purpose, and building community."Taking another poet's lines as her starting points, Leny creates mediations and meditations within which she tells her story and invites her readers to come in and dwell a while to contemplate what she has created: a retreat, a cocoon, a place in which to see oneself and to be seen, from which to spin forward and inspire other poetic awakenings."--Myriam J. A. Chancy, Guggenheim Fellow, author of The Loneliness of Angels, and HBA Chair in the Humanities, Scripps College

Glimpses: A Memoir: Through the MDR Poetry Generator

Biographies & Memoirs

Strobel, Leny Mendoza

Memoirs

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