Countless school children have recited the opening line of Poe's The Raven: "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary..." But Poe is valued not only for his poetry. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, the creator of two literary forms that readers everywhere enjoy--the detective story and the horror thriller.

A book for every patriotic American kid! Never before has the riveting American saga of "The Star-Spangled Banner" been so beautifully and thoroughly presented. This info-packed story of our national anthem includes: ★ Illustrated lyrics ★ The fascinating history of the War of 1812 and the battle that inspired Francis Scott Key to pen the words ★ Musical notation ★ Historical images ★ A reproduction of Key's original manuscript Caldecott Medalist Peter Spier's magnificent tribute takes readers from our anthem's turbulent origins at the Battle of Baltimore through the flag's significance in modern-day America. It's a must-have for every American family's library.

An inspiring memoir about love, race, identity, and contested narratives told with unflinching mettle. Through her childhood spent in 1940s New York being raised by two mothers, her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement, and raising her own children in the coalfields of West Virginia, Faith S. Holsaert has been defined by the intertwined forces of race, activism, and family. As a young woman on the front line of the Civil Rights Movement, she learned the power of contested narratives and came to understand her whiteness, her queer identity, and her stakes in overturning racism. Later in life, she confronted sexual abuse and mental illness across three generations of women in her family to find that these painful histories have played a significant role in the development of her identity as a woman, activist, and mother. Through a lifetime laid bare in prose and poetry, Holsaert beautifully quilts memoir, social history, and historic events into a gripping and inspirational narrative. This powerful and structurally innovative work lends new categories of meaning to those who would strive to find their place, hope, and sense of belonging in efforts to fight against systemic racism and lead lives characterized by openness and love.

These conversations between two linguistic scholars who were also husband and wife cover such topics as the characterization of the phoneme, symbolist poetry, the genetic basis of language, linguistic universals, semiotic systems, and aphasia and the process of language acquisition by children. In an afterword Pomorska describes Jakobson's acquaintances, friendships, and collaborations with international poets and artists -- Provided by the publisher.

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

The unspoken poetry of our nation revealed by an American master. The first collection of the extensive and superlative work realized by Mary Ellen Mark in the United States, Mary Ellen Mark is composed of many previously unpublished images, as well as photographs from several of her best-known projects. From "Streetwise" to "The Damm Family," Mary Ellen Mark includes the most iconic images from these groundbreaking stories, as well as powerful, never-before-seen photographs Mark accomplished in subsequent years. She makes a deeply felt commitment to her subjects, and her empathy and humanity come through in every image. Mark is unsurpassed at shaping not only the odd but the everyday into genuinely surprising visual icons. With an eye for symbolism and a gift for meticulous composition, she is drawn to a variety of spectacles and situations, and demonstrates a particular affinity for children. Her elegantly revealing imagery creates a fascinating portrait of our complex, amusing, and occasionally unsettling country.