How Narrow My Escapes

A new chapbook of poems by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

a slice from the cake made of air processes the physical and mental trauma of abortion coupled with the desires for sexual and emotional love against a backdrop of contemporary culture--with all the sexualization that comes with race, gender, and landscape. From front to back the book is wound through with a single poem whose language is permuted, translated, and retranslated (from English to English) as it cycles around abortion, both asking "what artifact / do I resemble" and stating "small love / small / you failed it / in person." The poems directly confront the sexual self ("This isn't a real orgasm, a real patellar fatigue") and take up the thesis abstract as a malleable form for interrogating the inevitable intersections and overlaps of brains and bodies. Sexy and volatile, a slice from the cake made of air winds over and through itself, with no conclusions or solutions for the mess of living in the world.

Finalist for the New England Book Award From a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional margins Negative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness. For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender. Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.

Here’s a powerful collection of 21 true action stories—the best of Ben East, his most exciting and inspiring narratives of narrow escape, written over the past 30 years. In each of these thrilling tales, this master outdoor writer recreates a dramatic adventure of an ordinary man, usually alone, facing and surviving a sudden threat to his life. All the stories in NARROW ESCAPES AND WILDERNESS ADVENTURES are true. Wherever possible, Ben East has personally interviewed the survivors of these ordeals. The authenticity, immediacy and color of each adventure is heightened by the wealth of detail the author has culled from local newspaper accounts, hospital records, even the correspondence about these men, written by families and friends. Each spellbinding story in NARROW ESCAPES AND WILDERNESS ADVENTURES unfolds against a great outdoors background: Alaska, Equatorial Africa, the Florida Keys, the Michigan woods and many others. In these locales, the men in Ben East’s stories battle heroically to stay alive as they find themselves hopelessly lost, stranded in sub-zero wastes, confronted by enraged beasts, or swamped by savage seas. Suspense continuously mounts as these amateur hunters and fishermen summon previously untapped wells of courage and endurance and, above all, their will to live when nature on the rampage strikes. In addition to being fascinating reading, this book is, in a real sense, an invaluable survival manual which shows how to improve the safety of your outdoor trips and how to survive dangers that cannot be foreseen.

A Disney story about a family of foxes.

From the city streets of Blackwood to the country roads of Nordelle, come along with Special Agent David Carter of the Central Investigations Unit (CIU) on the ride of his life.David Carter is young, eager, and naïve. When he is chosen from a pool of agents for a special undercover assignment, David sees it as an opportunity despite his obvious lack of wisdom, training, and experience. Can David prove himself worthy of the trust placed in him? Dieter Kleinmann is on a mission to bring down his longtime nemesis, Frank Alexander. As director of the CIU, Dieter has the authority to investigate Alexander’s organization. Can Dieter orchestrate the downfall of Frank Alexander? Drug lord and arms dealer Frank Alexander runs Blackwood. He is King. He is ruthless. He is also a husband and a father of two young daughters that he loves dearly. A contradiction? Not to a man who has mastered the art of compartmentalization. But, when the walls of his partitioned life start to crumble, can Frank continue being King? Adrianna Parker is a good woman in a bad relationship. Will a chance meeting with an old friend give her the opportunity, and the courage, she needs to break free and start over?

The shooting of a homicide detective is captured on film by a mysterious figure from a second-floor window, implicating Riley Keane, an anti-gun activist and a school shooting survivor. Riley flees Chicago for a frozen island in Lake Superior. A race to find her ensues between her secret lover— Chicago politician Finn O' Farrell— a corrupt police lieutenant, and the mysterious cameraman who extorts Riley' s family and Finn. Finn' s entanglement with Riley and the extortionist threatens his ambitious political career. On the island, Riley ingratiates herself into the close-knit community, but when she witnesses both an islander' s murder and another death in a suspicious boating accident, the local sheriff starts asking questions that begin to unravel her true identity. As the sheriff and the FBI are closing in on Riley, Finn faces media pressure to reveal his mysterious role in that long ago school shooting. If the facts come out, Finn may go to prison, but his biggest fear is that the truth will forever sever his relationship with Riley.

Wall Street is a funny business. All you have is your reputation. Taint it and someone else will fill your shoes. Longevity comes from maintaining that reputation. Ask Jack Grubman, the All-Star telecom analyst from Salomon Smith Barney; uber-banker Frank Quattrone at CS First Boston; Morgan Stanley's Mary "Queen of the Net" Meeker; or Merrill Lynch's Henry Blodget. Well, they probably won't tell you anything. But have I got some great stories for you. Successful hedge fund manager Andy Kessler looks back on his years as an analyst on Wall Street and offers this cautionary tale of the intoxicating forces loose in the world of finance that overwhelmed sober analysis.