An Ode to Darkness

An Ode to Darkness PDF Author: Sigri Sandberg
Publisher: Sphere
ISBN: 9780751578645
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
When did you last see the stars? 'Look at a satellite image of the Earth. Where it was once as dark as night, it is now lit up like a Christmas tree. If you zoom in on a city, you'll see floodlights, neon lights, car lights, and streetlamps. If you zoom in even further, to your own bedroom, you might see lamps and TV, tablet, and phone screens. If you live in a city and look out of the window, there will be a grayish yellow haze between you and the Milky Way. Even if it is night. Even if it is winter. Humans have always struggled with the dark, but isn't it light enough now? What is all this artificial light doing to us and everything else that lives? What is it doing to our sleep patterns and rhythms and bodies? I live in Norway, the land of the polar night. I have a cabin in the mountains in Finse. Darkness and stars can still be experienced there, particularly now during the darkest months of the year. I pack my bag and head up there. To seek out natural darkness, knowledge, and the night sky - and to see how long I dare stay. Because, paradoxically, I am afraid of the dark, and that fear is all-consuming, at least when I'm completely alone...' AN ODE TO DARKNESS explores our intimate relationship with the dark: why we are scared of it, why we need it and why the ever-encroaching light is damaging our well-being. Under the dark polar night of northern Norway, journalist Sigri Sandberg meditates on the cultural, historical, psychological and scientific meaning of darkness, all the while testing the limits of her own fear.

An Ode to Darkness

An Ode to Darkness PDF Author: Sigri Sandberg
Publisher: Sphere
ISBN: 9780751578645
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Get Book Here

Book Description
When did you last see the stars? 'Look at a satellite image of the Earth. Where it was once as dark as night, it is now lit up like a Christmas tree. If you zoom in on a city, you'll see floodlights, neon lights, car lights, and streetlamps. If you zoom in even further, to your own bedroom, you might see lamps and TV, tablet, and phone screens. If you live in a city and look out of the window, there will be a grayish yellow haze between you and the Milky Way. Even if it is night. Even if it is winter. Humans have always struggled with the dark, but isn't it light enough now? What is all this artificial light doing to us and everything else that lives? What is it doing to our sleep patterns and rhythms and bodies? I live in Norway, the land of the polar night. I have a cabin in the mountains in Finse. Darkness and stars can still be experienced there, particularly now during the darkest months of the year. I pack my bag and head up there. To seek out natural darkness, knowledge, and the night sky - and to see how long I dare stay. Because, paradoxically, I am afraid of the dark, and that fear is all-consuming, at least when I'm completely alone...' AN ODE TO DARKNESS explores our intimate relationship with the dark: why we are scared of it, why we need it and why the ever-encroaching light is damaging our well-being. Under the dark polar night of northern Norway, journalist Sigri Sandberg meditates on the cultural, historical, psychological and scientific meaning of darkness, all the while testing the limits of her own fear.

Dear Darkness

Dear Darkness PDF Author: Kevin Young
Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Incorporated
ISBN: 0307264343
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
A sixth compilation of poetry by the acclaimed author of Jelly Roll and For the Confederate Dead pays homage to members of his extended family, celebrates food and its meaning in life, deals with the grief over the death of his father, and counts his losses and blessings, all with a touch of the blues.

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time PDF Author: Will Durant
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439107149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time—listed in accessible and succinct form—by one of the world's greatest scholars. From the “Hundred Best Books” to the “Ten Greatest Thinkers” to the “Ten Greatest Poets,” here is a concise collection of the world’s most significant knowledge. For the better part of a century, Will Durant dwelled upon—and wrote about—the most significant eras, individuals, and achievements of human history. His selections have finally been brought together in a single, compact volume. Durant eloquently defends his choices of the greatest minds and ideas, but he also stimulates readers into forming their own opinions, encouraging them to shed their surroundings and biases and enter “The Country of the Mind,” a timeless realm where the heroes of our species dwell. From a thinker who always chose to exalt the positive in the human species, The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time stays true to Durant's optimism. This is a book containing the absolute best of our heritage, passed on for the benefit of future generations. Filled with Durant's renowned wit, knowledge, and unique ability to explain events and ideas in simple and exciting terms, this is a pocket-size liberal arts and humanist curriculum in one volume.

Ramshackle Ode

Ramshackle Ode PDF Author: Keith Leonard
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544649680
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
A sparkling debut collection from a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet that makes an ecstatic argument for living Containing joy and suffering side by side, Ramshackle Ode offers elegies and odes as necessary partners to bring out the greatest power in each. By turns celebratory, meditative, tender, and rebellious, these poems reimagine the divisions and intersections of life and death, the human and the natural world, the brutal and the beautiful. Time and again, they choose hope. From an award-winning young poet in the tradition of Marie Howe, Walt Whitman, Gerald Stern, and contemporary American bard Maurice Manning, Ramshackle Ode presents a new voice singing toward transcendence, offering the sense that, though this world is fragile, human existence is a wonderfully stubborn miracle of chance.

Human Dark with Sugar

Human Dark with Sugar PDF Author: Brenda Shaughnessy
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 1619320118
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description
“Brenda Shaughnessy’s poems bristle with imperatives: ‘confuse me, spoon-feed me, stop the madness, decide.’ There are more direct orders in her first few pages than in six weeks of boot camp...Only Shaughnessy’s kidding. Or she is and she isn’t. If you just want to boss people around, you’re a control freak, but if you can joke about it, then your bossiness is leavened by a yeast that’s all too infrequent in contemporary poetry, that of humor.”—New York Times “Shaughnessy’s voice is smart, sexy, self-aware, hip . . . consistently wry, and ever savvy.”—Harvard Review “Brenda Shaughnessy . . . writes like the love-child of Mina Loy and Frank O’Hara.”—Exquisite Corpse "In its worried acceptance of contradiction, its absolute refusal of sentimentality and its acute awareness of time's 'scarce infinity,' this is a brilliant, beautiful and essential continuation of the metaphysical verse tradition." —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Human Dark with Sugar is both wonderfully inventive (studded with the strangenesses of ‘snownovas’ and ‘flukeprints’) and emotionally precise. Her ‘I’ is madly multidexterous—urgent, comic, mischievous—and the result is a new topography of the debates between heart and head.”—Matthea Harvey, a judge for the Laughlin Award "Seriously playful, sexy, sharp-edged, and absolutely commanding throughout....Here you'll meet an 'I' boldly ready to take on the world and just itching to give 'You' some smart directives. So listen up."—Library Journal In her second book, winner of the prestigious James Laughlin Award, Brenda Shaughnessy taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets. Love. Sex. Pain. The heavens. The loss of time. The weird miracle of perception. Part confessional, part New York School, and part just plain lover of the English language, Shaughnessy distills the big questions into sharp rhythms and alluring lyrics. “You’re a tool, moon. / Now, noon. There’s a hero.” Master of diverse dictions, she dwells here on quirky words, mouthfuls of consonance and assonance—anodyne, astrolabe, alizarin—then catches her readers up short with a string of powerful monosyllables. “I’ll take / a year of that. Just give it back to me.” In addition to its verbal play, Human Dark With Sugar demonstrates the poet’s ease in a variety of genres, from “Three Sorries” (in which the speaker concludes, “I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all”), to a sequence of prose poems on a lover’s body, to the discussion of a disturbing dream. In this caffeine jolt of a book, Shaughnessy confirms her status as a poet of intoxicating lines, pointed, poignant comments on love, and compelling abstract images —not the least of which is human dark with sugar. Brenda Shaughnessy was raised in California and is an MFA graduate of Columbia University. She is the poetry editor for Tin House and has taught at several colleges, including Eugene Lang College and Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

All Down Darkness Wide

All Down Darkness Wide PDF Author: Seán Hewitt
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593300084
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature • Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness • Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed • A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read • Observer Book of the Week • Lammy Finalist “The most beautiful prose I’ve read in years.”—Alexander Chee, The Atlantic • "Rapturous...Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own."—Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review • “Exquisitely written.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot. Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty. Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.

Day & Night

Day & Night PDF Author: Aram Saroyan
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781574230857
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
"In late August of 1975 when my wife Gailyn and I and our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter arrived in Bolinas, I was almost 29 years old and had become known for writing minimal poetry sometimes consisting of a single word", Aram Saroyan writes in his introduction to Day and Night. "A young writer's ego is a delicate matter, subject as it is to routine battery and assault. When I wrote the first section of a long poem called 'Lines for My Autobiography' one afternoon on the typewriter in the poet Joanne Kyger's house. I was both exhilarated and uneasy. After all, it was two and a half pages long and I'd never before written a poem of even half its length. I ended up throwing it in the waste basket, but Gailyn fished it out, read it, and told me it was the best thing I'd ever written and to go on writing it". That poem and many others like it -- limpid, direct, revealing, open-hearted essays toward a first-person life story -- make up Saroyan's very appealing book about "big-city boys...becoming farmers" in an eccentric, idealist, crackpot-utopian California beach town in the 1970s. This is an unashamedly youthful book, starry-eyed in its approach to family-starting and community-founding, innocently celebrative of the simple wonders of a life lived close to nature. Glancing back at a glamorous but troubled childhood spent among the bright lights of Manhattan and the luxuriant palms of Beverly Hills, the young Saroyan experiences this new world with a freshness of vision.

The Archers Year Of Food and Farming

The Archers Year Of Food and Farming PDF Author: Keri Davies
Publisher: Seven Dials
ISBN: 9781474607681
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'What's for tea, Clarrielove?' From the fabled kitchens of Ambridge come the recipes and gossip that fuel the nation's favourite village. Whether it's Susan's spicy chilli con carne on the hob or Helen's dramatic tuna bake in the oven, Jill's flapjacks stacked high or Alastair's Goan fish curry hotting up suppertime, this celebration of Ambridge life will take fans even closer to the heart of every Archers home. But this book isn't just a cook-along with our favourite families. It's full to the brim with tales and memories. The Archers Year of Food and Farming shares the ups and downs of the inhabitants of Ambridge and celebrates our countryside in all of its green and pleasant glory. Month-by-month, we learn more about the farming community and those big events in the Ambridge calendar: Shrove Tuesday and Easter, lambing, Open Farm Sunday, the village fete, Apple Day, the harvest, Stir-up Sunday and Deck the Hall. Rural traditions are alive and well in The Archers, but it's a contemporary world that is full of warmth, wit and the unexpected.

The Ode Less Travelled

The Ode Less Travelled PDF Author: Stephen Fry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101216824
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Comedian and actor Stephen Fry's witty and practical guide, now in paperback, gives the aspiring poet or student the tools and confidence to write and understand poetry. Stephen Fry believes that if one can speak and read English, one can write poetry. In The Ode Less Travelled, he invites readers to discover the delights of writing poetry for pleasure and provides the tools and confidence to get started. Through enjoyable exercises, witty insights, and simple step-by-step advice, Fry introduces the concepts of Metre, Rhyme, Form, Diction, and Poetics. Most of us have never been taught to read or write poetry, and so it can seem mysterious and intimidating. But Fry, a wonderfully competent, engaging teacher and a writer of poetry himself, sets out to correct this problem by explaining the various elements of poetry in simple terms, without condescension. Fry's method works, and his enthusiasm is contagious as he explores different forms of poetry: the haiku, the ballad, the villanelle, and the sonnet, among many others. Along the way, he introduces us to poets we've heard of but never read. The Ode Less Travelled is not just the survey course you never took in college, it's a lively celebration of poetry that makes even the most reluctant reader want to pick up a pencil and give it a try.

Reckless Lovely

Reckless Lovely PDF Author: Martha Silano
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780989979719
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Martha Silano's newest collection of cosmic lingo tango