The Last Lover

The Last Lover
Author: Can Xue
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0300206887

divIn Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.” Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped./DIV

Rise and Float

Rise and Float
Author: Brian Tierney
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 63
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1571317724

Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page. With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release. The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

Full Body Burden

Full Body Burden
Author: Kristen Iversen
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2013-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307955656

“An intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security.”—Rebecca Skloot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks A shocking account of the government’s attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic waste released by a secret nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and a community’s vain search for justice—soon to be a feature documentary Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats--best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book is both captivating and unnerving.

Bounty

Bounty
Author: Kristen Ashley
Publisher: Kristen Ashley
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2016-04-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1310258295

Justice Lonesome has enjoyed a life of bounty. Even so, she’s inherited the curse of the Lonesome. A poet’s soul. Which means she’s still searching for something. Searching for peace. Searching for the less…that’s more. And when the foundation of her life is pulled out from under her, grieving, she goes to the mountains to find her oasis. She hits Carnal, Colorado and decides to stay. Deke Hightower lost everything at the age of two. He lost it again at fifteen. His life has not been about bounty. It’s been about learning to live with less, because there’s no way to get more. Deke’s also watched all his friends go down to the women who gave them what they needed. He wants that for himself. But he knows that search isn’t going to be easy because he’s a rider. His home is the road. That’s the only place he can breathe. And the woman who takes her place at his side has to do it sitting on the back of his bike. When Deke meets Justice, he knows she’s not that woman. She’s cute. She’s sweet. And she’s into him, but she’s got it all and Deke knows he won’t fit into that. So he holds her at arm’s length. Establishes boundaries. And Justice will take it because she wants Deke any way he’ll let her have him. But when Justice finds herself a pawn in a dangerous game, Deke makes a decision. When he does, he has no idea he’s just opened himself up to bounty.

Colorado 14er Disasters

Colorado 14er Disasters
Author: Mark Scott-Nash
Publisher: Big Earth Publishing
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2009
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1555664318

Fourteener mania, the phenomena characterized by a seemingly obsessive drive to summit The List of all fifty-four of Colorado¿s 14,000-foot peaks, is an older tradition than many may realize. Along with intensely positive experiences in climbing is the possibility of the opposite extreme¿to become stranded, severely injured, or even killed, in disturbingly easy ways. This book explores this dark side of climbing. When an accident happens on a 14er, the victim is far from help and in an environment where rescue is difficult at best. The book is full of hair-raising stories of these disasters and resue attempts and also aids in avoiding such disasters.

Meet Me Here at Dawn

Meet Me Here at Dawn
Author: Sophie Klahr
Publisher: YesYes Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN: 9781936919420

Poetry. Women's Studies. Eroticism tinged with elegy, gratitude knit with doubt; MEET ME HERE AT DAWN contains an unmistakably open voice. Sophie Klahr's debut poetry collection careens from hunger to hunger. With lyric energy and narrative determination, the poems are missives sent back from a threshold, chronicling disease, the unspoken pains of family, the fabric of an extra-marital affair. "What aperture makes a woman?" Klahr asks in "One Slaughter." In MEET ME HERE AT DAWN, even the unanswerable is unfaltering, every question brightly wrought and necessary. "Sophie Klahr moves through the chambers of the mind and heart like an expert escape artist, keys hidden in the body's coverts are revealed in a 'rush of knowing, ' the body's 'first breaking and entering' that feels both clandestine and disclosive. This is poetry of immense vulnerability and fierce mettle; determined, convincing and heroically alive with courage of every kind."--D.A. Powell

Finding Gold in Colorado - Prospector's Edition

Finding Gold in Colorado - Prospector's Edition
Author: Kevin Singel
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2018-05-26
Genre:
ISBN: 9781719553469

Travel guide book inspired by the gold prospecting origin of Colorado. Includes touring information on all the major towns founded as gold mining camps as well as summaries of each town's origin story. Includes reviews and recommendations on historic districts to visit, mines to tour, driving tours of ghost towns and places to gold pan. Includes information on 16 historic districts, 31 museums, 18 mines, 186 gold panning sites across the state of Colorado. Thoroughly researched to confirm public access to the panning sites (no private property or areas subject to mining claim has been included - unlike other books.)Written by a long-time Colorado resident and gold prospector. Based on years of research and field work.Get your share of the gold by prospecting for it in historic, urban, and remote locations across the gold districts of Colorado.

Descent

Descent
Author: Tim Johnston
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2015-01-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1616203048

A Breakout NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller An Indie National Bestseller “Outstanding . . . The days when you had to choose between a great story and a great piece of writing? Gone.” —Esquire “The story unfolds brilliantly, always surprisingly . . . The magic of his prose equals the horror of Johnston’s story; each somehow enhances the other . . . Read this astonishing novel.” —The Washington Post “Tim Johnston’s high-wire literary thriller . . . will leave you gasping.” —Vanity Fair “A riveting literary thriller of the can’t-stop-turning-the-page, stay-up-all-night variety.” —Alice LaPlante, author of A Circle of Wives The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, a young family from the plains taking a last summer vacation before their daughter begins college. For eighteen-year-old Caitlin, the mountains loom as the ultimate test of her runner’s heart, while her parents hope that so much beauty, so much grandeur, will somehow repair a damaged marriage. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic, as suddenly this family find themselves living the kind of nightmare they’ve only read about in headlines or seen on TV. As their world comes undone, the Courtlands are drawn into a vortex of dread and recrimination. Why weren’t they more careful? What has happened to their daughter? Is she alive? Will they ever know? Caitlin’s disappearance, all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family’s harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths until all that continues to bind them together are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point will a girl stop fighting for her life? Written with a precision that captures every emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for answers, Descent is a perfectly crafted thriller that races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion, and heralds the arrival of a master storyteller.

Site Fidelity: Stories

Site Fidelity: Stories
Author: Claire Boyles
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 039353183X

Finalist for the 2022 Reading the West Debut Fiction Award Finalist for the 2022 Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection Set in the western sagebrush steppe, Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet. Firmly rooted in the modern American West, Site Fidelity follows women and families who feel the instinctual, inexplicable pull of a home they must work to protect from the effects of economic inequity and climate catastrophe. A seventy-four-year-old nun turns to eco-sabotage to stop a fracking project. A woman delivers her own baby in a Nevada ghost town. A young farmer hides her chicken flock from the government during a bird flu epidemic. An ornithologist returns home to care for her rancher father and gets caught up trying to protect a breeding group of endangered Gunnison sage grouse. In lean, lyrical prose, Claire Boyles evokes the bleakness and beauty of our threatened western landscapes. Spanning the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future, this knockout debut introduces unforgettable characters who must confront the challenges of caregiving and loss alongside the very practical impacts of fracking, water rights law, and other agricultural policies. Site Fidelity is a vivid, intimate, and deeply human exploration of life on the shifting terrain of our changing planet.

Holy Moly Carry Me

Holy Moly Carry Me
Author: Erika Meitner
Publisher: American Poets Continuum
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781942683629

An unflinching, open-hearted inquiry that encompasses religion, disaster, resilience, infertility, adoption, parenthood, and what it means to love one's neighbor.