Bumble Bee Set to Become Officially Endangered


The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has proposed listing a species of bumble bee as an endangered species, the first bee species to be granted such federal protection in the continental United States.


"This decision comes not a moment too soon," said Rebecca Riley, senior attorney with NRDC. "Bee populations -- including thousands of species of wild bees -- are in crisis across the country, and the rusty patched bumble bee is one of the most troubling examples. (This) decision is a critical step forward. If finalized, the endangered species protections will improve the health of our ecosystem as well as the security of our national food supply."


blackacre

Blackacre
Poems
Monica Youn
Price$16.00
Read an excerpt
“Each poem feels urgent thanks to the tension created by language that is austere yet unsparing, and rhetoric that is restrained yet deeply emotional. . . . [Youn’s] intelligence feels extensive and inviting. . . . Blackacre stands as a gorgeous and intellectually scintillating addition to this esoteric and necessary tradition.”Chicago Tribune
“[Youn] tightly yet playfully interrogat[es] inheritance and legacy, real and fictional landscapes, and the particular bodily experience of a woman hoping to conceive. . . . Youn's lawyerly analyses—of life, of herself, her feelings, and of language—cut through the poetic to a place that lies between poetry, lyric memoir, and textual analysis.”Publishers Weekly

About the Book

The brilliant new collection by Monica Youn following Ignatz, a finalist for the National Book Award
the trees all planted in the same month after the same fire

           each thick around
           as a man’s wrist

meticulously spaced grids cutting the sunshine

           into panels into planks
           and crossbeams of light

an incandescent architecture that is the home that was promised you


—from “Whiteacre”
First coined in 1628, the term “blackacre” is a legal fiction, a hypothetical estate. It is also a password among lawyers marking one’s initiation into a centuries-old tradition of legal indoctrination. Monica Youn’s fascinating, multifaceted new collection, Blackacre, uses the term to suggest landscape, legacy, what is allotted to each of us—a tract of land, a work of art, a heritage, a body, a destiny. What are the limits of the imagination’s ability to transform what is given? On any particular acre, can we plant a garden? Found a city? Unearth a treasure? Build a home? Youn brings her lawyerly intelligence and lyric gifts to bear on questions of fertility and barrenness as she attempts to understand her own desire—her own struggle—to conceive a child. Where the shape-making mind encounters unalterable fact, Blackacre explores new territories of art, meaning, and feeling.

Additional Reviews

“In Monica Youn’s remarkable series of poems, words and objects are alike subjected to a probing intelligence that is at once philosophical and psychological. The precision of observation at every level is almost overwhelming. The reader cannot relax for an instant, nor does she want to because the unfolding thought, wire tight and tactile as well as conceptual, is so compelling and demanding of a complete attention that is more than rewarded.”—Stanley Fish
“Monica Youn, quite simply, is one of the two or three most brilliant poets working in America today. In these revelatory poems, the reader encounters an exhilarating thinking-through of all that lyric form entails. No one can match her for impeccable distillation; we knew that before. But in Blackacre, we also encounter a more expansive, undefended version of the poet than any of her previous work had led us to expect. This book is a marvel; read it and read it again.”—Linda Gregerson
Blackacre is virtuosic: poems so sharp and fine they cut deep past the body or the self or the mind—they’re needles of rain carving out a canyon. Death is as close as birth, and as far. Youn dazzles with her enigmatic loopholes—the taut noose, the elusive umbilicus, the Möbius qualities of longing and lack and love—which shadow or shape who we are, and what can be called ours.”—Brenda Shaughnessy

I gotta read this! BOOM!

Nothing to See Here, Move Along...

i'm loving win blevins

Praise for Moonlight Water

“First-rate book. Win and Meredith are a super couple and fine writers.” —Clive Cussler

“The ghosts of Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, and Joseph Conrad haunt MOONLIGHT WATER, the latest in the long and honorable tradition of road stories, but with 21st century angst laid in. To this, the Blevins writing team has introduced the themes of spiritual awakening, personal redemption, love rekindled—and a thumping good detective story. How they managed to fit all this between two covers, and in such entertaining fashion, is the stuff and substance of great literature.” —Loren D. Estleman

“A quirky and heartfelt story of a lost soul just trying to find some meaning in life. Aren't we all? The best part is the clear reverence for Navajo wisdom and the vast and wonderful desert from which it is born.” —Michael and Kathleen Gear

Moonlight Water takes the reader on the high road of adventure. Running from the rock & roll of an old life to the edge of the world & beyond. It's as old as time and as new as tomorrow. Love it.” —Gil Bateman, exec at Elektra Records, co-founder, Wyndham Hill Records

“Moonlight Water is an engaging, spellbinding novel of life, love, courage and redemption.” —Liberty Voice

In praise of frugality and a "simple life"

TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): In praise of frugality and a "simple life": From a story in Boston.com :

Late University of New Hampshire librarian and alumnus Robert Morin spent almost 50 years of his life catering to others...

A Perfect Circle - Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War



haunting, right? This boom can be heard around the world...

A Perfect Circle - Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums (Hecteli Remix)


here we go again with BIG BOOM

A Rare Black Moon Will Rise In the Sky on Friday Night



From the Western Hemisphere, the new moon occurring on Friday, Sept. 30, is a Black Moon. Officially, it occurs at 8:11 p.m. Eastern Time (5:11 p.m. Pacific Time).

Finks

I had not heard that word in a million years! Now this! BOOM!

When news broke that the CIA had colluded with literary magazines to produce cultural propaganda throughout the Cold War, a debate began that has never been resolved. The story continues to unfold, with the reputations of some of America’s best-loved literary figures—including Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, and Richard Wright—tarnished as their work for the intelligence agency has come to light.
Finks is a tale of two CIAs, and how they blurred the line between propaganda and literature. One CIA created literary magazines that promoted American and European writers and cultural freedom, while the other toppled governments, using assassination and censorship as political tools. Defenders of the “cultural” CIA argue that it should have been lauded for boosting interest in the arts and freedom of thought, but the two CIAs had the same undercover goals, and shared many of the same methods: deception, subterfuge and intimidation.
Finks demonstrates how the good-versus-bad CIA is a false divide, and that the cultural Cold Warriors again and again used anti-Communism as a lever to spy relentlessly on leftists, and indeed writers of all political inclinations, and thereby pushed U.S. democracy a little closer to the Soviet model of the surveillance state.

i hate this too

Semipalatinsk — The Soviet Union's Main Test Site

SEMEY, KAZAKHSTAN



Craters and boreholes dot the former Soviet Union nuclear test site Semipalatinsk
Craters and boreholes dot the former Soviet Union nuclear test site Semipalatinsk. (Photo: CTBTO/CC BY 2.0)

The Polygon in the former Soviet closed city Semipalatinsk (known today as Semey) was the primary nuclear test site of the Soviet Union. In total, 456 nuclear tests were conducted here between 1949 and 1989, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric explosions. Altogether, the number of nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk equals more than 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. A huge number of craters, partly filled with water, testify to these experiments.
Located relatively close to a major settlements, this is also the site of one of the most horrible legacies of the Cold War era: where the Soviet Union tested nuclear bombs on civilians. The military conducted these nuclear tests without regard to the health effects on the 200,000 residents of the Semipalatinsk area, who weren't evacuated or warned during the actual explosions. Residents noticed health terrible problems soon after the first tests, and though the site was finally closed in 1989, the legacy of the nuclear tests lingers on. An area of more than 18,000 square kilometers is heavily contaminated and over a million people have been diagnosed with health problems. Nevertheless, even today people continue to live in the Polygon area.

bag lady

Ok, I have to admit, bags/handbags/purses speak to me.. Like these! (BOOM)




just a reminder

  good reminders!  


oh yeah...

oh yeah...

Trace's book