"Motion, Britain's poet laureate, was 16 in 1968 when his beloved mother fell into a coma after a hunting accident and his childhood "ended suddenly." After this shock opening, Motion recounts the scenes and events of that childhood, which range from warm early memories of growing up "country gentry" in Hertfordshire to being sent off to a Dickensian boarding school—with disgusting food, terrible sanitation and a headmaster who enjoyed beating little boys—at age seven. The book soars into the extraordinary when Motion recounts his early teens. A new boarding school brought a sympathetic headmaster who recognized the potential in the unread country boy's love for Dylan and Hendrix and encouraged him toward poetry. (A heartwrenchingly beautiful scene describes his slow, awed discovery of Thomas Hardy.) By age 15, Motion had made his first real friend and entered a new relationship with his mother, who read eagerly in partnership with him. Motion perfectly conveys the "new faster time" of adolescent thinking and subtly conveys us back to his mother's tragedy with a new understanding of its importance to his entire life."
                - Publishers Weekly, August 13, 2007

Despair over the temporariness of the human condition and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, is at the heart of British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A paean to his family and to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with clarity, detail, and care a whole world that has past. The book begins in the present tense in December 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion's desire to capture and keep unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. "My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day," writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes. If I can keep it safe, I'll be able to look back and feel safe myself . . . I just want everything as it was, when I saw the world for the first time."

Eschewing the confessional or critical tone of some memoirs, and the investigatory or elucidatory approaches of others, Motion strives to recreate the voice and vision of the boy he once was, taking care not to sully or distort with hindsight what is felt to be still very much alive in memory. Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing in Scotland with his father, the horrors of prep school at the young age of seven, or his discovery of Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues his recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he will be; readers of Motion's poetry will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," as in the book's title and epigraph from Wordsworth, can be neither taken from us nor lost.

"There seems to be no limit to the number of ways in which there might occur what Wordsworth called the growth of a poet's mind . . . He might well have acknowledged a family resemblance in his latest successor."
-Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

"A sad, gripping and powerful story."
-Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

"Brilliantly achieved and novel-like."
-John Mullan, Guardian

"The most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read . . . In the Blood will always be Andrew Motion's elegy to his mother. For those of us fortunate enough to read this superlative memoir, it's a celebration of mothers everywhere." 
-Charlie Lee-Potter, Independent on Sunday

In his Superior Person's Book of Words and its two sequels, the incorrigible Peter Bowler did his best to spread confusion throughout the English-speaking world by encouraging his trusting readers to use obscure, sometimes preposterous words for no other purpose than to impress (or conveniently befuddle) their peers. But he recently experienced a "Road to Damascus" conversion. Confronted by the damage being inflicted on his beloved Mother Tongue by the pretentious, euphemistic, obfuscatory, and self-aggrandizing cant now running amok in our military, corporate, and academic arenas, he is mounting a one-man campaign to return us to sanity.

The Superior Person's Field Guide is a call for the return to simple, straightforward words that say what they mean and mean what they say. Most of us know that "downsizing" means that you're about to be fired, but have you ever heard its business-speak cousins "offshoreable" or "cash-flow episode"?

With his customary wit and clear-sightedness, Bowler cuts a swath through the thickets of popular jargon, casting daylight on such linguistic deformities as "interrogate with prejudice" (that is, torture) and "unforeseen geological event" (a mining disaster). Impatient with euphemism, he examines ugly specimens forced into bloom in the interests of political correctness – "waitperson," "developmentally challenged" – designed to help the squeamish avoid direct confrontation with the simple facts of sex and disability. Here are circumlocutions that make the disagreeable seem agreeable, the unacceptable acceptable, and here is Peter Bowler, as always, trying to set the record, and the English language, straight.


"A lexicon devoid of practical value but replete with entertaining possibilities...Not for the faint of wit."
-Publishers Weekly

Graphic artists recognize genius when they see it, and most acknowledge that de Vicq's website and book, "Bembo's Zoo," was a milestone in creative design. In his new effort, de Vicq takes the designs of type and ornaments (known affectionately in the trade as "dingbats") and common linecuts to form the faces of his literary heroes. In the second part he combines type ornaments and icons to suggest a face with singular attributes: pride, fear, fanaticism, and surprise. But these are not drawings; they are images arranged from the combination of specific and discrete graphic forms. They are created on a computer and not in a composing stick. They are the face, and faces, of the future.

Printed throughout in two colors, often displaying the various letters, sorts and ornaments that make up the whole, this is our typographic offering of the year – wholly original, totally inventive. In these typographic assemblies transformed into ingenious portraits, de Vicq has managed, in the prose of Prose, "to make the alphabet sing."

In this new collection of linked poems, Leland Kinsey offers a new installment of his moving and powerful narrative verse. Arriving by horse-and-carriage as a child, the main character of this sequence embodies the cultural transformation that so many American families have endured, while Kinsey's verse captures the twentieth-century themes of displacement, work, and transformation in bold, crisp detail. No subject is beyond his grasp: travels through the Canadian wilderness, a baseball game in Florida, the sabotage of archaeology, a night crossing to Cuba, a lonesome poacher's soliloquy. He always connects these disparate themes with a sure hand, constructing something sure to resonate with every American – newcomers and first settlers alike. It is all here, acute, ambitious, and accessible.
The Immigrant's Contract is the most masterful and engaging story of what it means to be an immigrant in America that I have ever read. 
– Howard Frank Mosher

Metropolitan Tang is Cambridge poet Linda Bamber's first book of poetry, a debut that is erudite and sassy, urban and urbane. Whether she is examining the breakup of her marriage or watching bulls in a field, considering Derrida's concepts of "presence" or her hairdresser's less theoretical philosophy, Bamber receives stimuli as indiscriminately as an antenna, all eyes and ears; then her sharp and curious mind gets to work, turning over images and ideas until she finds their proper relations, making meaning out of random juxtapositions, sense out of chaos, or, if nothing else, a good joke out of a bad situation. Most first books of poetry are tentative experiments in voice; Bamber's voice, sensitive and, at the same time, wry, is clear throughout, uniquely hers and eminently likeable.
As a reader I have often wished, over the years, for a female poet in the style of [Frank] O'Hara: bopping but sincere, humanistic and grounded but exuberant and irreverent. Linda Bamber may be that person. 
– Tony Hoagland

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves with this collection of thirteen new short stories an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of "Lush Life" by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover in Strayhorn's song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing and potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, "always simmering," as Coleman writes in the final story, "ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo."

Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. "Nothing will satisfy me," she has written, "short of an open society and social parity."

Listen to the NPR review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clocl Tales from "All Things Considered."

Read a review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales at the San Francisco Gate.

"Every story in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales conveys a fresh verbal improvisation, an unexpected lightness, and the sure understanding of the complexity of the world. Wanda Coleman is a poet and a musician."
— Maryse Condé, author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

"Wanda Coleman is a distinctive and original voice in American letters. I love the way that she can combine the poetic and the conversational modes, the delicate way she balances between the comic and the tragic, the sly, insinuating complexity that runs under the surface of seemingly straightforward situations. The stories in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales are inimitable creations—as is Wanda Coleman herself. She is a national treasure."
— Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing

Shouldn't life be more than simply showing up? Is it enough to be part of a family, make another family, earn your living, and then exit stage left? Or should you engage and be engaged in a bit of purposeful shaking and shoving along the way?

These are questions that Kit Bakke urgently needs answered. Tired of self-proclaimed gurus and self-help books, she turns to her childhood role model -- Louisa May Alcott -- for direction. She sends an e-mail to Louisa, and is amazed when she receives a reply. Their correspondence becomes a dance of ideas and tales bridging the mid-1800s and the twenty-first century.

But why Louisa? "Her abolitionist zeal, her women's rights advocacy, her hospital work, her crazy commune days, her heartfelt desire to leave the world a better place, her humor and her energy all materialized in front of me," writes Bakke. "Louisa was serious when she signed her letters, 'Yours for reforms of all kinds.' She made her life, she didn't just live it."

When Kit Bakke came of age in the late 1960s, America was going through major social and political turmoil. She and many of her generation elected to pursue radical ways to protest the Vietnam War and civil rights injustices at home, and Bakke joined the notorious Weather Underground. Eventually she left the movement to become a wife, a mother, and a professional nurse, but the persistent questions about the best way to live her life, make her contribution, and find satisfaction remained.

By initiating her extraordinary correspondence with Louisa May Alcott, Kit hopes to "pick up some clues for my friends and myself about how better to live the thirty or so years that might be remaining to us. And besides, we would be giving Louisa a treat that couldn't be beat -- a peek into the future."

"(An) excellent book. . .the effect is like a wonderful movie shot with a hand-held camera."
-Washington Post Book World

Catie Copley has a very special job - she is canine ambassador at a big, beautiful hotel in Boston. She lives with Jim, who also works at the hotel, and spends her days in the lobby, sleeping, greeting people, chasing balls, and sleeping some more.

People are always coming and going, and sometimes they require her special skills - such as a really great sense of smell and a dog's-eye view of the hotel - to help them out. When a guest at the hotel loses her favorite bear, Catie knows that her moment of canine glory has come. Not only must she cheer up Tess, but she also has to sneak away to find the bear somewhere in the maze of back rooms before Tess has to go home.

The adventures of Catie Copley are based on the real-life experiences of a small black labrador, originally trained as a guide dog. She had a career change and is now a member of the guest services team at the storied Fairmont Copley Plaza, where she shares her unique breed of hospitality daily.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will benefit the Association for Guide Dogs for the Blind.

Upcoming events featuring Catie Copley:
* October 24, Wednesday, Read Boston, United South End Settlement, South End, Boston. Debbie Kovacs will read and sign.
* November 3, Saturday, Debbie Kovacs at Concord Bookshop, Concord, MA, 10:30 am, reading and signing
* November 7, Wednesday, Debbie Kovacs, Pike School, Andover, MA
* November 8, Thursday, Debbie Kovacs, Barnes & Noble, Prudential Center, Boston, MA, 6 pm
* November 13, Tuesday, reading and signing at the British School of Boston, Jamaica Plain, 10 am
* December 1, Saturday, Debbie Kovacs reading and signing as part of Winterlights at the Prudential Center, Boston