Bøger udgivet af Mercury HeartLink

This book, a pictorial and written record of life in rural Oregon during the late 1800s and early 1900s, includes a brief history of immigration to the United States and the Oregon territories. In these pages, author, Toni Gilbert, crafts a living, breathing picture of her pioneering grandparents. While some official papers remain intact, much of Gilbert's information was passed down orally. Current descendants of the Curtis-Wilson family had several old picture books containing photographs by Lilly Wilson Curtis, Gilbert's grandmother, who was a trained photographer. These, along with Lilly Wilson Curtis's saved newspaper articles, lend beauty and credence to the stories. Taken together, Gilbert's sources reveal the urban cultural trends, personality traits, and family patterns that formed the life paths of her ancestors.Toni Gilbert, ASN, BA, MA, uses her education in the fields of nursing, psychology, and art to increase her reader's understanding of life in rural Oregon in the early part of the last century. Having studied the human condition for decades, Gilbert brings a deep appreciation for the human experience to her family history.Lyle Curtis, Contributor, has gifted the reader with considerable research into the lives of his ancestors, both on-line and in person, and has traveled to the eastern and southern United States, to Iowa, and to Illinois, seeking further information about the lineage of the Curtis and Wilson families.

In No One To Wake, Marilyn C. O'Leary shares "a bouquet of mourning" the death of her husband of fifty years. This book of poetry is beyond beautiful. And one needn't have been married for fifty years, or married at all, to feel softly wrapped in the understanding of how it feels to lose someone you love deeply. Both pain and transcendence are painted in her poems, plus the naturalness and magic of death itself "...you took your leave breathing like a fish, swimming out into an ocean of darkness and love." She also addresses the guilty urge to look back and question whether she did enough, whether she was enough "The recipe for my life had ingredients you didn't like," and then acknowledges that "Our relationship was whole." And then there's the need to go on. She recognizes the "freedom" that comes from loss; "sadness an opening... (to) find yourself unwrapped. I could do anything, be anything, go anywhere," she writes, but "What if it wasn't you who kept me tethered?" In this small book, O'Leary takes us from the dark folds of anguish where we're sometimes drawn towards death ourselves, to the realization that "The answer to all is Life."

In this nostalgic rendition of postwar Albuquerque in the Fifties and Sixties, seven authors bring their unique perspectives as they share memories of growing up in what could be described as a "Norman Rockwell" time in our country's history. This anthology features seven voices from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds who tell their stories of childhood. No two stories are the same. One takes you to the candy counter at Fedway Department Store. Another talks about the debilitating disease of polio. Some stories hint at discrimination and cruelty, a reality during that time in history. One story deals with the devastation of the Bataan Death March from a child's point of view. One deals with the Fourth of July, not as a patriotic holiday, but as an adventure into the vast world of fireworks. These stories will move you to laughter and to tears. More importantly, you will share the optimism of our writers and the nostalgia of the times as you are reminded of the taste of fresh apricot empanadas, the aroma of warm buttered tortillas, the sweet honey combined with puffy sopapillas, and the magic that was once childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In this debut book Ann Rayburn leads us on her journey as she looks for clues to understand her life. In poems and brief prose sketches she explores the people, the losses, the places, the events that have helped shape her life. From eccentric aunts to rock-climbing companions, from secrets found in a sister's youthful journals to reflections on the character of the moon, she has found her way to reconciliation. Always anchored in the world of growing things, challenged and renewed by the garden she has tended for many years, Ann Rayburn shares with the reader, as she does with those personally close to her, a thoughtful exploration of what life demands of all of us: courage and patience.

Coyote Points the Way: Borderland Stories and Plays. is a compilation of fiction, nonfiction and ten-minute plays that explore the borderlands, both literal and figurative, where individual resourcefulness, creativity, intuitive knowing and courage make all the difference. Many of the stories are set in Colorado's vast San Luis Valley, the largest alpine valley in the lower 48 states; two of the plays are derived from the author's experience teaching holistic health in a federal women's prison; and all of the pieces are inspired by the people, animals, times and places that continue to shape the author's life.

If using musical terms, Moments of Time by Mark Fleisher ranges through several octaves and timbres, and up and down the scale to define his inspirations and poetic voice. His observations range from uncomplicated subjects to romantic love to thoughts both personal and universal about war and conflict. Along the continuum are poems reflecting his sense of humor, often frivolous and whimsical. Moments of Time contacts the senses and stokes the emotions, but also entertains, encourages laughter, and revives nostalgic memories.Writing in an approachable and accessible manner, Fleisher remembers his youth in the 1950s and 1960s of New York City, the horrific inhumanity of Vietnam and a major personal loss to finally find new life in an unfamiliar place across the continent.

Limitlessness, a collection of poems by Matthew P. Crowley, explores self, nature and cosmos. Fearless, microscopically honest and authentic, Crowley invites us to journey with him into the boyhood magic of muddy puddles, through the dark night of personal searching, the terrors and joys of love, and the awe of grand landscapes, both inner and outer. Selected from 18 years of inspired writing, Limitlessness delves into spiritual cosmology and relationship, both personal and ultimate, and demonstrates the poetic process of writing through revealed snapshots of the authors life experiences. The central thread that runs the length of these poems is the will and courage to love above all else.

Continuing in a tradition of collaboration Fixed and poetry anthology 2015 presents its second volume of poems submitted by writers who have participated in the Fixed and Free monthly poetry reading hosted by Billy Brown in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now in its seventh year. Celebrating poets from differing generations, ethnicities and cultural settings, this anthology proffers a variety of poetic forms including the sestina, haiku, open verse, slam and prose poetry. Rather than rely on a regional, academic or ideological theme, this collection includes a wide selection of poems from poets who meet monthly to perform and appreciate the written and spoken word. The strength of this endeavor resides in the dedication of its participants to value community above all other identifiers. The reader will not only experience the literary qualities inherent in this work but can join with others in the camaraderie and spirit of authentic collaboration.

For his second book entitled Troth & Rapture: 400 Sonnets, Stanley Paul Thompson has selected 400 delectable treats of love and adventure to let his readers feel that fervor. Written almost exclusively in the format of Shakespeare, many are read as if one in the sixteenth or seventeenth century had sat and penned sonnets of the Renaissance Period; thus, a feeling of that period may be felt. Being blessed in knowing fabulous women throughout his life, Mr. Thompson has crafted these sonnets so that the reader can experience the deep love and admiration he has felt for these women. Immerse yourself in these sonnets and feel the passion of romance and thrill of adventure.

On August 16th, 2006 I was admitted to a hospital ER in Albuquerque, NM, dying. Not knowing what the cause was, my brother Dan had taken me there after I was found at home passed-out for several days. The ICU scared me but I was able to describe what it was like, and who was there. Outside of my door was a dark harbinger who, I discovered from Lupita the cleaning lady, was Señor Muerto (death). A dialogue with the Grim Reaper ensued. My story progresses with visits from The County Health Department, spiritual advisors, friends, then some indication of perhaps the cause. On day 10 the physician in charge of the Infectious disease team stated that I had the Bubonic Plague. In some ways, my physical recovery was just the beginning of a re-awakening and the joy of working with others. Several chapters are devoted to how I may have contracted it. Included are several chapters about the history of the three pandemics of the plague. Then a rude awakening to my incapacitation, and a dialogue with the insightful cleaning lady. I express thoughts about my family back east not visiting, nor any close female friends coming to see me. Once I began to heal and walk again, conversations are had with others in the facility, a move to long-term care, then circumstances of pending discharge. Sandwiched in are a couple of chapters about the process of change including a discussion regarding recovery from substances abuse. Once released, I faced going back home alone and starting a work life re-awakened to a new life-purpose. Work is ultimately obtained in correctional facilities; and there are several tales of interactions with inmates. The final chapter is a conversation with Death/Life. There is an underlying theme about not taking the catastrophe so personally, integrating the experience and moving forward with life. Sprinkled with humor as well as serious moments, it is one of the few personal accounts about surviving a death encounter from this rare disease.

Reaching for Air, Gayle Lauradunn's debut poetry collection, tells the story of a childhood spent in a landscape full of beauty, hardship, and violence. In their restless yearning and relentless motion, these poems feel completely American. Interspersed with the voice of the child is that of the adult woman, as both an extension of the child and as a counterpoint to the child's experience. Each poem stands alone, yet is a piece of the whole. This is poetic storytelling at its finest. REACHING FOR AIR was named a Finalist for the Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters for 2015.

A Mother's Story is a searing and intimate portrait of addiction and how it has been passed down in Maggie Romero's family from generation to generation. Maggie is herself an addict, and when Angie's drug addiction, at age twenty-two, became apparent to her, she jumped into a recovery program to cope with her daughter's illness. The subsequent twelve years have proven to be a powerful and poignant redemption journey, as she has gradually come to claim recovery for herself even as she's watched her beautiful daughter continue to struggle. This award-winning memoir is a story of hope and recovery that will resonate with many people, as epidemic as addiction is in our society. Many will benefit from her experience and the lessons passed on.

This newest collection of musings, From Lipstick to Chapstick, from Barbara R. DuBois is the honest, humorous and straightforward accounts of a woman who records life with curiosity and fairness. As a series of compassionate but unsentimental anecdotes, this memoir unfolds before us into a tapestry of a long life well-lived.

These poems surprise. Behind the warmth and seeming simplicity Noll has a way to make us rethink the commonplace of our lives. Through his gentle prodding we come to new insight into human relationships as well as our interactions with nature. In Notes to My Mortician, Bruce Noll uses warmth and sardonic wit to help us experience our world.

In Klokking Twelve: Snapshots of a Life, Elaine Mingus takes the reader on a remarkable journey through various aspects of place, class and culture in 20th Century America-all through the keen eyes of a woman determined to find love and meaning within, and beyond, the world as it unfolded before her. In this uniquely structured memoir Mingus creates twelve snapshots for each of its four sections. Each snapshot is accompanied by a back-story or supporting information that provides further relevance and vitality concerning places and events, many now lost in the bustle and remake of history. In the first snapshot she is six years old; in the last snapshot she is well into her eighties. Astute though kind in her assessments, Mingus makes good use of a long life of sharp observation. Open about flaws in her life, and humble about successes, Mingus searches her heart as well as her mind in the telling of these stories, digging deep for their meaning. She tells how important love has been in her life, and with the wisdom of her years she shows tolerance for every person, family and otherwise, who has crossed her path. People in all walks of life will find something to appreciate in this honest story of a girl from a background of poverty and without a college education, who raised a family, put out three newsletters, was sought after as a spiritual adviser, wrote poetry for the sake of art, and became a James Joyce scholar. Elaine Mingus has two previous books: Toccatootletoo: Papers on James Joyce; and Leally and Tululy: Free Verse.

Once again, in Dorothea and Preston, a story of love, David Bachelor has captured humanity at its awkward but noble best, striving as always against unforeseen odds. In 1940 while hate and destruction in Europe were building to a second world war, Dorothea Dolan runs her quiet boarding house on the shores of Lake Michigan. Here she loves and cares for the elderly who have been broken by the Great Depression. Dorothea's commitment to her charges is absolute and her tacit motto is "no one will suffer" as she attempts to rescue them from slow and painful declines. Into this setting Michigan State Police Detective Preston Duhamel strides in search of thieves and incorrigibles-who he finds, and sometimes who find him. Preston, however, is fleeing his own afflictions. With redemption just around the corner, Dorothea tries to help her lover and herself, as they are both challenged by elemental powers beyond their control.

Hush Hush and Other Veneers by Alexandra Dell'Amore is the true story of girl who endured abuse to protect her family and eventually shot the man who her parents called "doctor." Although she protected her family from an evil man, she nevertheless became an outcast. The story shows how greed and lies kept her from being believed. Her lonely journey charts her self-effacing life from the 1940's to the present. By fearlessly exploring her past, Dell'Amore realized the shame and guilt she had embraced were never hers. Hush Hush and Other Veneers is a journey of resilience and courage in the face of self interest and denial from a society that looked the other way-it is a story of hard-won freedom.

Arranging the Constellations is the record of a man who straddles the worlds of science and myth and is faithful to both. A physicist who writes poems and yearns to keep the ancient fires of inspiration lit and burning, Robb Thomson can both fondly recall his father's Model T and recognize all too well the first consequences of global warming. There is a hard-won courage in these poems: they accept the passage of time that teaches us how to live with loss after loss and, at the same time, they celebrate the pleasures of the here and now. Behind them, there is a deep-rooted belief in Beauty-in the elegant equations of physics and mathematics; or the magic of language that speaks, at moments, with a power beyond what we know. These poems trace a lifetime spent learning to grasp the right questions to ask; to live artfully, with the hope of adding one man's "marginalia" to the sacred text of the here and now and what lies beyond, "more real than real." -Robert Cording holds the Chair of Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross, and is the author of several collections of poetry, including Life-list, Heavy Grace, and Walking with Ruskin.

When poet Shirley Blackwell set out on daily walks along the bordos, or footpaths, bordering the acequias (irrigation ditches) of New Mexico's high desert, she discovered herself in a parallel universe where cultures, ecosystems, a code of conduct supporting human survival, and centuries-old folklore were tied directly to acequia community. In Ditchbank Diaries, an experimental mingling of prose and poetry she calls haibuñera, Blackwell invites us to walk with her and the thousands before her, ancient puebloans of Chaco Canyon, Spanish colonists of the 16th Century, even the Conservancy ditch rider who patrols her daily route, to explore this largely unknown cultural heritage that defines both geological and spiritual landscape in the Land of Enchantment. In these pages we meet the inhabitants, wild, domesticated, human, and mythological, who create the acequia's "collective imaginary," that sense of place, tradition, sacredness, enchantment, linked to the villages dotting New Mexico's uplands and canyons. There, acequias sustain a precious way of life. However, as Blackwell reveals how the ditchbank walks have transformed her own life, we see that acequias are vital to all of us.

In Homeward, Elizabeth Keough McDonald relies on her poems to speak for themselves. Whether it is about family, place, love lost and found, friendship or the experiences of military service and its aftermath, Elizabeth lets the hand of her poems go and reach towards yours. Hold on tight or shake loose!

At once sweeping, visceral, earthy, gritty, ethereal, and primordial, Karla Linn Merrifield's Lithic Scatter and Other Poems unfolds a kaleidoscopic odyssey of the American West at its all-natural wildest. Here is the frontier seen - and felt - through the eyes of a visionary poet who explores the region's vast terrains as anthropologist and archeologist, historian and ethnographer, shaman and seeker-after-self. From the whimsical to the emotionally searing, these 59 poems evoke vast landscapes rich in myth and mysticism, loss and hope. Merrifield captures the West's majesty and brings it home for all to discover.

Stewart Warren's latest collection, "Somewhere Beautiful Like Earth," seem to emanate from a hypnagogic state, some liminal zone between waking and sleep. He tells his stories but tells them slant, in words as compelling and impossible to ignore as the voice that speak to us on the verge of dreams.

This diverse, vibrant book is modeled, like Joyce's Ulysses, on Homer's ancient epic, using it as an allegorical scaffolding for the poet's own experience as a Black man in contemporary America. The author's language runs the gamut from the vernacular to the Elizabethan; everything from pattern poems, free verse, prose poems, sonnets to parodies of Mother Goose. Remarkable in scope, every poem stands on its own while arranged in chapters that lead the reader through an epic journey of human trials-poverty, desire, injustice, racism-and ultimately to a transcendent awareness of beauty, joy, love and personal triumph.

Here There is Also Burning is Stewart S. Warren's tenth full-length collection of poetry. Whatever your poetic tastes, core beliefs or temperament, you will not be able to read this book complacently. You will engage it emotionally, intellectually, spiritually or, more likely, in some combination thereof. Here There is Also Burning is a fusion of dearly held and deeply ingrained American character, folklore and myth. Warren doesn't simply talk about these things: his poetry embodies them. He has listened long and patiently to this land and its people, and his voice is, like Walt Whitman's and Woody Guthrie's, a genuine and compelling vernacular whorl, a transformative narration and description of the Southwest that goes cosmic.

Rather than make a career of poetry, Stanley Thompson has engaged a number of careers from which he has drawn the details and essence of personal experience which he brings forth in Sonnets of Life Well Spent. Motivated by the death of his beloved wife Patricia in 2011, the stories of his journey have come into sharper focus with an enhanced meaning that has allowed him to present this collection of 126 poems in the style of memoir. The reader will not only experience sonnets in the format, and even in the tone, of William Shakespeare, but will come to appreciate the life of the author, a life, indeed, well spent.

The scripted mission Thea must undertake is daunting. The guidance unfathomable. The experience dangerous and magnificent. The love unexpected, essential and of the highest nature one can conceive. A journey that is out of this world. One you have been invited to take.

Some poems are meant to be heard, and some to be soaked up by the eye. Teasing out the Divine carries both, to be shared in voice with community or passed quietly from one hand to another around a small campfire along a desert river, or between lovers on a summer night when it's too hot to sleep. These poems delve into dreams, mountains, ravens and rattlesnake medicine, relationship and the mythic life of the human spirit, and remind us that what we seek is in our hearts all along.

To find a hidden thing already there, one must first pay attention. A childhood spent in the grand but unforgiving landscapes of the desert southwest and a career as a national security analyst reinforced that insight for Shirley Blackwell. Already There is an eclectic harvest of poems found by combining rigorous intellectual investigation with a personal longing to understand both the workings of the cosmos and of the human heart. Whether the topic is caring for a mother-in-law with dementia, finding one's own path, or lessons in courage for a 4-year-old terrorized by a neighbor's vicious turkey, the poet speaks in a voice of unflinching candor. The natural world suffuses this book both as metaphor and for its own, but don't expect a sentimental treatment of the birds and beasties in these poems. They all occupy a niche in the food chain. What you can expect is poetry imbued with depth and whimsy, scientific fact and mythical fantasy, gentleness and raw honesty-all couched in precise, musical language. These perceptive poems celebrate the strength of the human spirit as well as its place in a wondrous universe.

Set in a ghost town in California's Mojave Desert, Seeing Into Stone: A Sculptor's Journey is a memoir about the author's struggle with flaws in her vision, her carvings and her new marriage as she searches for her identity as an artist. Through her fifteen-year apprenticeship with Gordon Newell, a wise and patient stone sculptor, she learns that carving stone and wood can be understood as a metaphor for life: go with the grain and not against it; trust that the form inside will emerge in its own good time; and realize that understanding comes slowly, chip by chip.