Finding the Sweet Spot offers practical, creative, and insightful solutions to the most aggravating, frustrating, and intimidating aspect of the San Francisco urban experience: PARKING! This indispensable guide, loaded with previously-unpublished information, takes a keep-it-simple approach and applies keen wit plus local wisdom to the problem that befuddles tourists and bedevils residents of the City by the Bay.

Finding the Sweet Spot - The Insider's Guide to Parking in San Francisco

David LaBua

Terrapin Books

Why do dolls compel us so much? What are their meanings? What lessons do they have to teach us? The Doll Collection explores these questions. This wonderful anthology of poems asks us to rethink dolls. Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood. Dolls shape our thinking about the female body, about race and class. Dolls influence our understanding of childhood. Symbols of perfection, they both comfort and terrify. Dolls represent, as Freud would say, the “uncanny.” They are replicas, simulacra, souvenirs and secrets. They are objects we recall with intense nostalgia but also bodies we dismember and destroy. They might be made of cornhusks, clay, rags, paper, cloth, wood, porcelain, celluloid, bisque, plastic, or metal. For centuries, dolls have taught us how to understand our world and are windows to other worlds. Dolls are portals to our pasts and to ourselves. Dolls open the doors to our imagination. (from the Introduction, by Nicole Cooley) The Doll Collection, the first anthology to focus on dolls, includes 88 poems by such poets as Michael Waters, Cecilia Woloch, Alice Friman, Lee Upton, Chana Bloch, Kelly Cherry, and Jeffrey Harrison.

The Doll Collection

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Antiques & Collectibles

A poetry tutorial to inform and inspire poets. Includes model poems and prompts, writing tips, and interviews contributed by 56 of our nation’s finest poets, including 13 former and current state Poets Laureate. An additional 45 accomplished poets contributed sample poems inspired by the prompts in this book. Ideal for use in the classroom, this book has been adopted by colleges and universities across the country. It is equally ideal for individual use at home or for group use in workshops. Geared for the experienced poet as well as those just getting started. Guaranteed to break through any writer's block. This revised edition contains a full Table of Contents and an Index.

The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop

Literature & Fiction

Lockward, Diane

History & Criticism

The Crafty Poet II Named a Best Book for Writers by Poets &amp; Writers ". . . Each of the ten sections thoroughly explores and discusses craft tips provided by an experienced poet (Ellen Bass, Ada Limon, Dean Young, and others) and includes illuminating sample poems and related writing prompts." Like the original, The Crafty Poet II is organized into ten sections. We again end with "Revision," but this time we also begin with it in "Revising Your Process." That section is followed by one on "Entryways into Poems" which considers how a poet might get going with a poem and how a poet might pull in a reader with humor and enticing titles. There is in-depth discussion of the importance of choosing the right words; using syntax, line breaks, and spacing to advantage; and enhancing the music of poems. There is a meaty section on how to add complication to your poems, another on how to divert or transform your poems from their original intention, and another on special forms of poems. In "Expanding the Material" three poets consider how to write poetic sequences using paintings, photographs, and history. The final section, "Revision," moves beyond the usual advice to "get rid of adjectives" as one poet offers ways to revise via sound, another offers a series of expansion strategies, and, finally, poet Dick Allen issues a warning against excessive revision. All ten sections include three craft tips, each provided by an experienced, accomplished poet. Each of these thirty craft tips is followed by a Model poem and a Prompt based on the poem. Each model poem is used as a mentor, again expressing the underlying philosophy of the first book that the best teacher of poetry is a good poem. You will find that the model poems receive more analysis than in the first book and that the prompts are a bit more challenging. Each prompt is followed by two Sample poems which suggest the possibilities for the prompts and should provide for good discussion about what works and what doesn't. Each section includes a Poet on the Poem Q&amp;A about the craft elements in one of the featured poet's poems. Each section concludes with a Bonus Prompt, each of which provides a stimulus on those days when you just can't get your engine started.

The Crafty Poet II: A Portable Workshop

Poetry

I love these poems, love how they sweep me along, sweep me up into the arms of the kind of longing that seems unsayable, untranslatable, impossible to describe in any language, with any words—the words turning back into breath, as this poet says, as she creates the sense of that longing, itself, in words, in these sometimes-breathless lines, sometimes against the restraint of form, the sweet ache of rhyme, creating that sense of urgency that’s so like desire, itself, and the sense of danger that infuses even the deepest pleasure, especially the deepest pleasure. I’ve never read poems that seem to me more accurate about love and desire and sexual relationships and their almost-inevitable shattering—darkly gorgeous and expertly-crafted poems, with a white-hot lyric intensity and a narrative pull that becomes cumulative, an erotic veering toward doom. And yet, the persistence of longing is the life force, too, refusing to exhaust itself: How could anything in the universe be undying / when everything rushed forward, trailing light?                                                   Cecilia Woloch, author of Carpathia

The Persistence of Longing

Knight, Lynne

The vast and minute details that lodge within the words “my life” come forth resplendently in these poems. Jessica de Koninck is fluent in the impossible Esperanto of God and cinder blocks, Elvis and glue guns but, also, understandably haunted. Life very much includes death in her poems, the way knowledge includes ignorance. A stubborn, jumpy vitality abides, capable of real truth-telling as it examines, discards, clutches, praises and murmurs about the relics of love and grief. —Baron Wormser  

Cutting Room

Self-Help

De Koninck, Jessica

Relationships

Bluewords Greening is a book about motherhood—love and family and fear and failure and mini-ninjas. We observe a mother’s bewildering experiences with her son as the poems detail his diagnosis with a rare form of epilepsy and the “bluewords” that result from his aphasia. The speaker is in deep conversation with the son’s frustrated and often surprisingly beautiful lexicon; she’s also in conversation with the work of contemporary visual artists and the craft of printmaking and the twelfth-century visionary, St. Hildegard. Stewart-Nuñez’s music and skilled syntax and stubborn insistence on the beauty of the world—even as the poems explore the heartbreak of recurrent miscarriage—keep the reader rapt and grateful and illuminated. Bluewords Greening is a marvelous book. —Beth Ann Fennelly, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother

Bluewords Greening

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Stewart-Nuñez, Christine

Diseases & Physical Ailments

How do we move forward after enormous loss? Perhaps like the lightning-struck tree, “half of it shorn of leaves the other half full, standing, / swaying….” In these beautiful, intimate poems spoken from the heart of grief, the speaker urges herself not to flinch, “letting the knife settle where it will, / blade nestled between a rib and a rib.” Life and death go hand and hand here, and the natural world that consoles is also a constant reminder of our own mortality. Because Clark is a terrific poet, she can also make something true and moving “out of cold air…with lamenting words…an invigorating, heel-kicking tune.” —Sharon Bryan, Sharp Stars

The Canopy

Clark,Patricia

If you want to learn how to live on this planet, read How to Wear This Body, a lyric and riveting book uniquely suited to help us survive the hard facts of our existence and to do so with wit and courage, intelligence and grace. Yes, everything is coming to an end. / The way it does each hour of the day. No better night for carnivals, you say. In wry and wise poem after poem, Hayden Saunier offers us heady wine and late-season asparagus, companionable dogs and grandmothers dropping the wide straps of their brassieres, roadside theatre and heart surgery while sleeping, grief and the wherewithal to brave it, and in every poem room is left / for the cracked-// open door of the ordinary miracle. --Christopher Bursk

How to Wear This Body

Saunier, Hayden

Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham selected fifty-four poems by fifty-one poets, happily including Denise Duhamel, Jack Bedell, Mira Rosenthal, Martha Silano, Julian Stannard, Charles Harper Webb, and others. With all poets singing together, we have a rainbow of words--alive, nourishing, rich--that clearly define the range and power of the once humble doughnut. Poetry and confection make for a delicious marriage. And who knew we'd live to see sugar, fat, and dough connected to the divine? 
 --Grace Cavalieri, Introduction

The Book of Donuts

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Baking

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