Hypergraphia And Other Failed Attempts At Paradise

Download or read book Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise written by Jennifer Metsker and published by New Issues Poetry and Prose. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of poems that delve into the experience of living with bipolar disorder. With Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, Jennifer Metsker reaches for an understanding of the ecstasy of madness, utilizing both lyric and prose forms that mimic the sublime state of mania through their engagement with language. Ordinary life becomes strange as these poems question what happens when the mind overthrows the body. At times playful and humorous, at times dark, above all these poems aim to approach mental illness from a personal and compassionate perspective.

Download or read book The Midnight Disease written by Alice W. Flaherty and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An original, fascinating, and beautifully written reckoning . . . of that great human passion: to write.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, national bestselling author of An Unquiet Mind Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, also offers a compelling personal account of her own experiences with these conditions. “[Flaherty] is the real thing . . . and her writing magically transforms her own tragedies into something strange and whimsical almost, almost funny.”—The Washington Post “This is interesting, heated stuff.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Brilliant . . . [a] precious jewel of a book . . . that sparkles with some fresh insight or intriguing fact on practically every page.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer “Flaherty mixes memoir, meditation, compendium and scholarly reportage in an odd but absorbing look at the neurological basis of writing and its pathologies . . . Writers will delight in the way information and lore are interspersed.”—Publishers Weekly

Download or read book My Wilderness written by Maxine Scates and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of My Wilderness often take place on the wooded hillside in Oregon where Maxine Scates has lived since the mid-1970s. They chronicle how the woods, which were once a refuge, have turned into a landscape of change where trees once numerous are now threatened by storm and the presence of the humans who live among them. These poems also engage her partner’s threatening illness, the death of her closest friend, and the death, at age one hundred, of her mother, an indomitable figure who led Scates through a working-class childhood in Los Angeles fraught with domestic violence. Grounded in the shifting borders of migrations and extinctions plant, animal, and human, of memory and grief, My Wilderness inevitably asks us to consider not only our own mortality but also our impact on the world around us. Excerpt from “Dear Maple” Nothing will save you now unless the small branches sprouting like a halo from your eight-foot stump take hold. The young women at the Farmer’s Market are already selling the most beautiful turnips, glowing like pearls, and all spring the swale of camas shone blue in the morning light. How can any of us know what will save us?

Download or read book The Neurology of Religion written by Alasdair Coles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines what can be learnt about the brain mechanisms underlying religious practice from studying people with neurological disorders.

Download or read book Ongoingness written by Sarah Manguso and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important. Maintaining that diary, now eight hundred thousand words, had become, until recently, a kind of spiritual practice. Then Manguso became pregnant and had a child, and these two Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary—it is a haunting account of mortality and impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around and over and through us. “Bold, elegant, and honest . . . Ongoingness reads variously as an addict’s testimony, a confession, a celebration, an elegy.” —The Paris Review “Manguso captures the central challenge of memory, of attentiveness to life . . . A spectacularly and unsummarizably rewarding read.” —Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Download or read book Consilience written by E. O. Wilson and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-11-26 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.

Download or read book Killing Albert Berch written by Alan Berch Hollingsworth and published by Pelican Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1923, a white hotel owner in rural Oklahoma took a bullet to protect his black employee. They were then killed by a mob, and newspapers from Dallas to the East Coast covered the crime. This true story sent ripples of revulsion through the region at the time but has been lost to history until now, thanks the grandson of the hotel owner, who sets down the account here.