Book (b)

"H. Melt’s SIRvival in The Second City: Transqueer Chicago Poems is a guide and lightning rod; a contestation of every border imaginable and a celebration of the necessary and ingenious spaces created by the public presence(s) of courageous Trans & Queer people(s) engaged in the construction of new culture(s) and identities for us all." *

This book is a combination of sketches, poetry, and letterpress.

This collection of erotica was conceived during a time of celibacy and spiritual contemplation, with a strong sense of reunification between body, spirit, soul and mind. Muyassar's observations are revealed through visceral language and rhythm, invoking and embodying the chthonic, long-forgotten power of the Goddess.

This is not only a book for firemen, men and women. It is a about them, about what they do all the time. It is about their work and their tradition and dedication. It is for all of us who don’t know. It is for all the people to whom I have shown photos who never realized how curious they actually were.

This is a biography of the late songwriter Steve Goodman. From the back of the book: "This is the comprehensive, untold story of a young man whose hilarious, touching and provocative music - "City of New Orleans," "You Never Even Call Me By My Name," "Banana Republics," "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" and many more stellar songs - uplifted millions from the late 1960's to the early 1980's and continues to do so today."

One Man's Life: A Poetic Review is a book of poetry by Chicago native John W. McGuire, Sr. His poems focus on lessons that he has learned in his life, and his faith and love of the American family.

"There is an all at once quality to lyric poetry that makes it akin to mysticism. It knows there is more to vision than meets the eye. It takes the whole world in while knowing the whole of it is always known imperfectly, always here, always now. The here and now of the seventy-one poems in Steven Schroeder's new collection is most often Chicago, the Plains, or West Texas. The poems play on the imperfection of the eye, turning on the voice that can, with care, be heard over the noise at edges where silence slips into the "look!" or "listen!" trailing a flash of insight. These poems take place in time, as all embodied things must do, and place is precisely what the imperfection of the eye sings, celebrating "the sacrament / of a city of solitaries marking time," listening for a rainbow where "fragments fall / on silence broken."

"Judith Valente’s poems are deeply rooted in the everyday world, and yet transport us to a place in the soul, a place that C.S. Lewis once described as “the real, real world.” She is a poet concerned with those moments that telescope the sacred in the ordinary, offer a clarifying vision of what it means to be human, and remind us we are part of something larger than ourselves. These are love poems to life, whether she is writing about a lunar eclipse, the origin of the alphabet, the art of finding beauty in flaws, or an imagined stroll with William Carlos Williams. The poems contain a keen sense of place. They transport us to a summer parade in rural Illinois, a beach under stars on the island of Maui, a sacred festival in Chiang Mai, a classroom in a Catholic girls school in northern New Jersey. In language that is at once accessible and inventive, these open-handed poems remind us it is a miracle simply to be alive." http://vacpoetry.org/discovering-moons.html