Think of surprises! Perhaps a street or a place and time that you would never expect, a person or event that you forgot you yearned for, or maybe discovering something that you have never known. There is a world of wonder in every surprise. Just as in life, I am inspired to explore or serendipitously come upon the unexpected. These moments keep life delicious and are little gifts. Embrace surprises because they fuel imagination. Unwrap surprises with the same enthusiasm you had when everyt...

Coco Bijou lives life fully and with an insatiable curiosity. Through sheer will and determination, inspiration and magic, grace and experience, pain and joy, mistake and triumph, she has experienced an epiphany: when we live life with an open mind and heart, we become ourselves and shape our destiny. Here, she shares her journey with others, in the hopes of inspiring them to life-changing epiphanies of their own.As a young person, she started to keep journals and filled them with ...

Driven by the desire to help her three-year-old daughter settle down into a peaceful night's sleep, Maureen Garth devised meditations that would help her daughter feel secure and cared for. Starbright is a collection of the stories Garth created as her child grew older. these innovative meditations are simple visualisations parents and teachers can read to their children to help them sleep, develop concentration, waken creativity, and learn to quiet themselves.

In this eloquent collection, award-winning writers from the United States, Canada, the UK and Australia describe a personal encounter with the natural world that moved them, enhanced their understanding of nature, changed them, or was in some other way of prime importance to them. These essays describe childhood memories, everyday walks transformed into life-changing events, being in the grip of a great force, startling encounters with wild animals, and even one fantasy.Contributor...

Michael Ondaatje’s selected poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, brings together poems written between 1963 and 1990, including work from his most recent collection, Secular Love. These poems bear witness to the extraordinary gifts that have won high praise for this truly original poet and novelist.

Evocative and superbly rakish, these essays are a generous diagnosis of the often offbeat worlds of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through the real life adventures of Susan Musgrave. Equally at home recounting the lore of her outlaw husband Stephen Reid, or interpreting the arcane rituals of her teenage girls, Musgrave brings to her literary essays that same invigorating freshness for which he has become known in her fiction and poetry. In settings ranging from the a...

Winner 2015 Griffin Poetry PrizeIn Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called "the gifts reserved for age." A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his "battered blue Sonoma" is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sh...

“Hoagland’s verse is consistently, and crucially, bloodied by a sense of menace and by straight talk.” —The New York TimesMy heroes are the ones who don’t say much.They don’t hug people they just met.They don’t play louder when confused.They use plain language even when they listen.Wisdom doesn’t come to every Californian.Chances are I toowill die with difficulty in the dark.If you want to see a lost civil...

#1 Poetry Foundation BestsellerMichigan Notable BookA beautifully mysterious inquiry... Here Harrison-forthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerning-a gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico García Lorca to how he touched a bear’s head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual...

Much of this poised and luminous book is rooted in an idea of epiphany, an aesthetic of everyday incarnation; not the sudden and profound manifestation of essence or meaning, but the smaller steps taken toward it. The moments in which, as Joyce writes, “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” If epiphanies are for theologians, perhaps the little steps towards them are for poets like Eve Joseph, and for all of us who attempt to see beyond the names we give things to the names...

THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING POETGary Snyder offers over 35 poems inspired by his travels, career, and family—each showcasing the profound elegance and range that make him a legend of 20th-century American poetry.This present momentThat lives onTo becomeLong agoIn this stunning poetry collection, Gary Snyder finds himself ranging over the planet. From journeys to the Dolomites, to the north shore of Lake ...

“One could do worse than to grow up on a river.” In his new collection of essays, Wayne Curtis voyages back through the tributaries of his past, throwing a pastoral net over the backwaters of his childhood to ensnare the sepia-tinged moments of love, loss, and life lessons he gleaned through his rise to maturity on the waterways of New Brunswick. As Proust recalled his past through the delicate taste of a madeleine, so, too, Curtis ruminates on growing up on the Miramichi, albeit through t...