{"title":"Emerald City Books","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"opening-king-david-book-brad-davis-9781608995547","title":"Opening King David","description":"Description: The human experience is an intimate, tough, and, at times, hilarious conversation with what is familiar and what is mystery. Poetry at its best turns this conversation into art and teaches by example how to employ language creatively and courageously--even coyly--in exploring the full range of human response to whatever life may deliver. Certainly the biblical Psalms set the highest of standards in this regard. In Opening King David, Davis takes aim at making contemporary poems in conversation with the Psalms; his personal, cultural, and natural surroundings; and the wonder and mess of his own soul. As a painter with all colors at his disposal, Davis writes with the full spectrum of his available vocabulary, sometimes reaching for the glorious ineffable, at other times bluntly telling it like it--darkly--is. Neither devotional nor inspirational nor religious, these human poems take God seriously and honor our common struggle toward what Saint Paul calls the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Endorsements: Like a Rabbi opening the sacred text, then toiling further yet to open every word therein, Brad Davis has pored over both the scriptures and our common circumstance to prod, to raise our wits, that we might glimpse how every challenge, every adversity might be met with grace. --Scott Cairns author of Compass of Affection About the Contributor(s): Brad Davis has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Eastern Connecticut State University, Pomfret School, and The Stony Brook School. Winner of an AWP Intro Journal Award and the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, he has had poems published in Poetry, The Paris Review, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, Ascent, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. 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His story-based technique empowers abused teenagers to reimagine their lives through myths and folktales and so restore their vitality. Such vitality, however, eludes Tony in his own life. Mired in depression, he longs for his fractured family and fends off childhood flashbacks too painful to face. Tony's mentor recommends classical underworld myths as a roadmap for the spiritual journey toward healing and hope, but Tony is too drained for the undertaking. Until Carey Foster enters his life. Carey is a golden-voiced eleven-year-old choral soloist at a local Catholic boys' home. Brought to Tony's treatment center with his wrists sliced, Carey cowers mutely with his secrets in the center's locked ward, a flicking middle finger his only beacon. Carey's healing depends on Tony's ability to navigate the labyrinth of deception and cryptic self-disclosure that conceals the soul's darkest secrets. It also depends upon Tony's willingness to navigate the labyrinth of love and disappointment lodged in his own soul. At once a psychological study of how trauma is healed; a hero's journey through the underworld of abuse, betrayal, and shattered faith; and a theological thriller in search of a credible and sustaining Sacred in the midst of unspeakable suffering, The God of Shattered Glass reveals that stories do indeed heal, and that the way to God is not up, but down. Endorsements: This novel is a breath-taking, soul-searing, and truth-telling experience. When you allow Frank Rogers to take you into the lives of child psychologist Tony Backman and the boy Carey Foster--after a few sentences, you will be in Rogers' masterful grip--then you will enter straight into the depths of the human condition . . . I urge all serious readers to put on a diving mask and plunge into The God of Shattered Glass. This is a story that dares those who seek and teach truth to look into its mirror. --Carol Lakey Hess author of Caretakers of our Common House: Women's Development in Communities of Faith Would that more of us theologians could write in this vein . . . It is one thing to assert that God is utterly compassionate toward every creature and calls us to a like compassion. It is quite another to draw us through the depths of hell and hatred to a realization of that compassion, even for ourselves. Frank Rogers' novel existentially deconstructs the cosmic patriarchy that so distorts the thinking of believers and unbelievers alike--and all the false expectations it has conjured up. --John B. Cobb Jr. author of For the Common Good and Christ in a Pluralistic Age As somebody who has spent over thirty years working with troubled youth, I found Frank Roger's The God of Shattered Glass a revelation. He not only knows the boys in residential homes, he knows the world that created them. Equally important his narrator, Tony, a psychologist, who tries to save a boy who has been abused, comes alive as a passionate person who is willing to 'dine with demons, ' and reveal his hopes and fears. This book illuminates a much neglected corner of our world and shows how it is connected to the rest of us. --Daniel Judah Sklar playwright and author of Playmaking: Children Writing and Performing Their Own Plays About the Contributor(s): Frank Rogers is Professor of Spiritual Formation and Narrative Pedagogy at the Claremont School of Theology. As a narrative educator and spiritual director, he works with marginalized young people and adult survivors of childhood abuse, using story as a means of personal healing and social empowerment. Their stories, and his, inform this novel. Frank lives in Southern California where he runs in the foothills and hikes in the mountains. 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His story-based technique empowers abused teenagers to reimagine their lives through myths and folktales and so restore their vitality. Such vitality, however, eludes Tony in his own life. Mired in depression, he longs for his fractured family and fends off childhood flashbacks too painful to face. Tony's mentor recommends classical underworld myths as a roadmap for the spiritual journey toward healing and hope, but Tony is too drained for the undertaking. Until Carey Foster enters his life. Carey is a golden-voiced eleven-year-old choral soloist at a local Catholic boys' home. Brought to Tony's treatment center with his wrists sliced, Carey cowers mutely with his secrets in the center's locked ward, a flicking middle finger his only beacon. Carey's healing depends on Tony's ability to navigate the labyrinth of deception and cryptic self-disclosure that conceals the soul's darkest secrets. It also depends upon Tony's willingness to navigate the labyrinth of love and disappointment lodged in his own soul. At once a psychological study of how trauma is healed; a hero's journey through the underworld of abuse, betrayal, and shattered faith; and a theological thriller in search of a credible and sustaining Sacred in the midst of unspeakable suffering, The God of Shattered Glass reveals that stories do indeed heal, and that the way to God is not up, but down. Endorsements: This novel is a breath-taking, soul-searing, and truth-telling experience. When you allow Frank Rogers to take you into the lives of child psychologist Tony Backman and the boy Carey Foster--after a few sentences, you will be in Rogers' masterful grip--then you will enter straight into the depths of the human condition . . . I urge all serious readers to put on a diving mask and plunge into The God of Shattered Glass. This is a story that dares those who seek and teach truth to look into its mirror. --Carol Lakey Hess author of Caretakers of our Common House: Women's Development in Communities of Faith Would that more of us theologians could write in this vein . . . It is one thing to assert that God is utterly compassionate toward every creature and calls us to a like compassion. It is quite another to draw us through the depths of hell and hatred to a realization of that compassion, even for ourselves. Frank Rogers' novel existentially deconstructs the cosmic patriarchy that so distorts the thinking of believers and unbelievers alike--and all the false expectations it has conjured up. --John B. Cobb Jr. author of For the Common Good and Christ in a Pluralistic Age As somebody who has spent over thirty years working with troubled youth, I found Frank Roger's The God of Shattered Glass a revelation. He not only knows the boys in residential homes, he knows the world that created them. Equally important his narrator, Tony, a psychologist, who tries to save a boy who has been abused, comes alive as a passionate person who is willing to 'dine with demons, ' and reveal his hopes and fears. This book illuminates a much neglected corner of our world and shows how it is connected to the rest of us. --Daniel Judah Sklar playwright and author of Playmaking: Children Writing and Performing Their Own Plays About the Contributor(s): Frank Rogers is Professor of Spiritual Formation and Narrative Pedagogy at the Claremont School of Theology. As a narrative educator and spiritual director, he works with marginalized young people and adult survivors of childhood abuse, using story as a means of personal healing and social empowerment. Their stories, and his, inform this novel. Frank lives in Southern California where he runs in the foothills and hikes in the mountains. 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You're sure you understand what you're seeing, but it's not until you've finished flipping through the entire album that you develop an intimate sense of who this family is. You thought you knew them, understood all the subtleties and dynamics, but, change the angle, soften the focus, flip the page; there's a different story. Jesse, the narrator, is on a search. She's trying to identify the dropped stitches in her own life, to name them, and reknit them into a whole. As the book opens Jesse's mother is dying, but Jesse and her father find it impossible to face the inevitable. Turn the page: Jesse desperately wants to have children; she's a lesbian; she has to figure out how to make that happen. Later we meet her children, Noah and Sophie; we're introduced to Anna, who becomes Jesse's spouse, before the world has caught up with the concept. We meet grandparents, and learn that in Jesse's family writing is revered, but infused with unspoken taboos. And we meet her brothers who each has a particular place to stand in the family portrait. Jesse has a story to tell, and she isn't sure it's safe to tell it. Loss and grief, being silenced and silencing oneself, becoming frozen, and the heat-generating, melting power of love, these are the themes in Just a Dropped Stitch. The importance of naming, the redemption that comes from breaking silences, these are the interwoven threads. Meanwhile, keep flipping through the album and you see snapshots of everyday life: hiking with Noah, shopping with Sophie for a bat mitzvah dress. And Jesse's mother, who refuses to completely disappear, makes a surprise appearance, embarrassing Jesse at a job interview. As we close the album, we're keeping vigil with Jesse in the hospital while she waits to hear whether she has the disease that killed her mother. And, then, there's a final snapshot: a handmade Chinese box, with sides that drop open, revealing a blood-red interior where there's nothing to hide. How do you tell a life story, with all the myriad stories, the secrets, the multiple selves that go into it? Laurie Levinger has written her way to an answer beautiful and true, fierce and tender, redemptive and heart-rending. In the process she's found a form and a voice that can carry the full range of a woman's--daughter's, mother's, sister's, lover's--experience. Listen. --Ellen Lesser author of The Shoplifter's Apprentice, The Other Woman, and The Blue Streak Once I began reading, I could not stop. It is a beautifully written memoir, and more: a provocative revelation about love, family, the death of a generation impacted by holocaust, and the politics of fear and acceptance. It needs to be read  --Laura Simms storyteller and author of The Robe of Love Laurie Levinger takes us from one stage of adulthood with all it's suffering and joys to another so seamlessly that we are only gradually aware of the giant steps she has taken to claim her voice. There is a camaraderie of spirit in these stories that weaves the reader in. She bravely raises difficult issues, looks at them squarely, with intelligence and compassion. --Charlotte Houde Quimby New Hampshire State Representative Laurie Levinger is a retired psychotherapist who lives and writes in Vermont. She is the author of What War? 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Certainly the biblical Psalms set the highest of standards in this regard. In Opening King David, Davis takes aim at making contemporary poems in conversation with the Psalms; his personal, cultural, and natural surroundings; and the wonder and mess of his own soul. As a painter with all colors at his disposal, Davis writes with the full spectrum of his available vocabulary, sometimes reaching for the glorious ineffable, at other times bluntly telling it like it--darkly--is. Neither devotional nor inspirational nor religious, these human poems take God seriously and honor our common struggle toward what Saint Paul calls the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Like a Rabbi opening the sacred text, then toiling further yet to open every word therein, Brad Davis has pored over both the scriptures and our common circumstance to prod, to raise our wits, that we might glimpse how every challenge, every adversity might be met with grace. --Scott Cairns author of Compass of Affection Brad Davis has taught at the College of the Holy Cross, Eastern Connecticut State University, Pomfret School, and The Stony Brook School. Winner of an AWP Intro Journal Award and the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, he has had poems published in Poetry, The Paris Review, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, Ascent, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. 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While there he stumbles through the summer on his wayward journey of self-discovery, bouncing from one impetuous impulse to another, becoming involved in the misbegotten capers of a gang of petty crooks and falling into a romance with an older woman. His motivation for his trip begins to wane as he gets mired in small-town life and wrapped up in the problems and preoccupations of the people around him. So when an old friend cruises into town under mysterious circumstances and offers a ride to California, Russell sees a chance to get back on the road and back on track, if he can extricate himself from his entanglements. Endorsements: Turner's precise yet graceful prose flashes at the crossroad of young adulthood that is unique to his lusting-for-life protagonist but familiar to every American. Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Stewart O'Nan, The Grand March makes a grand debut novel, capturing a slice of one man's life that defines contemporary culture. --Carol Cassella national bestselling author of Oxygen and Healer About the Contributor(s): Robert Turner spent many years wandering through America with notebook in hand. The Grand March is his first novel, and the first in a projected series of four books chronicling a group of errant souls over several years as they struggle to play the confusing hands they've been dealt.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52538020167953,"sku":"NLS9781498255806","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781498255806.jpg?v=1783680987"},{"product_id":"grand-march-book-robert-turner-9781608993512","title":"The Grand March","description":"Description: When young Russell Pinske feels life is passing him by, he hits the road to shake things up. He catches a ride as far as his hometown in Indiana to visit friends and find a way to the West Coast. While there he stumbles through the summer on his wayward journey of self-discovery, bouncing from one impetuous impulse to another, becoming involved in the misbegotten capers of a gang of petty crooks and falling into a romance with an older woman. His motivation for his trip begins to wane as he gets mired in small-town life and wrapped up in the problems and preoccupations of the people around him. So when an old friend cruises into town under mysterious circumstances and offers a ride to California, Russell sees a chance to get back on the road and back on track, if he can extricate himself from his entanglements. Endorsements: Turner's precise yet graceful prose flashes at the crossroad of young adulthood that is unique to his lusting-for-life protagonist but familiar to every American. Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac and Stewart O'Nan, The Grand March makes a grand debut novel, capturing a slice of one man's life that defines contemporary culture. --Carol Cassella national bestselling author of Oxygen and Healer About the Contributor(s): Robert Turner spent many years wandering through America with notebook in hand. The Grand March is his first novel, and the first in a projected series of four books chronicling a group of errant souls over several years as they struggle to play the confusing hands they've been dealt.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52589536444689,"sku":"NLS9781608993512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53109762162961,"sku":"NIN9781608993512","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781608993512.jpg?v=1786272385"},{"product_id":"just-a-dropped-stitch-book-laurie-e-levinger-9781608990672","title":"Just a Dropped Stitch","description":"Just a Dropped Stitch is a memoir told in interlocking short stories. It's a family photo album; each snapshot tells a mini-story. You're sure you understand what you're seeing, but it's not until you've finished flipping through the entire album that you develop an intimate sense of who this family is. You thought you knew them, understood all the subtleties and dynamics, but, change the angle, soften the focus, flip the page; there's a different story. Jesse, the narrator, is on a search. She's trying to identify the dropped stitches in her own life, to name them, and reknit them into a whole. As the book opens Jesse's mother is dying, but Jesse and her father find it impossible to face the inevitable. Turn the page: Jesse desperately wants to have children; she's a lesbian; she has to figure out how to make that happen. Later we meet her children, Noah and Sophie; we're introduced to Anna, who becomes Jesse's spouse, before the world has caught up with the concept. We meet grandparents, and learn that in Jesse's family writing is revered, but infused with unspoken taboos. And we meet her brothers who each has a particular place to stand in the family portrait. Jesse has a story to tell, and she isn't sure it's safe to tell it. Loss and grief, being silenced and silencing oneself, becoming frozen, and the heat-generating, melting power of love, these are the themes in Just a Dropped Stitch. The importance of naming, the redemption that comes from breaking silences, these are the interwoven threads. Meanwhile, keep flipping through the album and you see snapshots of everyday life: hiking with Noah, shopping with Sophie for a bat mitzvah dress. And Jesse's mother, who refuses to completely disappear, makes a surprise appearance, embarrassing Jesse at a job interview. As we close the album, we're keeping vigil with Jesse in the hospital while she waits to hear whether she has the disease that killed her mother. And, then, there's a final snapshot: a handmade Chinese box, with sides that drop open, revealing a blood-red interior where there's nothing to hide. How do you tell a life story, with all the myriad stories, the secrets, the multiple selves that go into it? Laurie Levinger has written her way to an answer beautiful and true, fierce and tender, redemptive and heart-rending. In the process she's found a form and a voice that can carry the full range of a woman's--daughter's, mother's, sister's, lover's--experience. Listen. --Ellen Lesser author of The Shoplifter's Apprentice, The Other Woman, and The Blue Streak Once I began reading, I could not stop. It is a beautifully written memoir, and more: a provocative revelation about love, family, the death of a generation impacted by holocaust, and the politics of fear and acceptance. It needs to be read  --Laura Simms storyteller and author of The Robe of Love Laurie Levinger takes us from one stage of adulthood with all it's suffering and joys to another so seamlessly that we are only gradually aware of the giant steps she has taken to claim her voice. There is a camaraderie of spirit in these stories that weaves the reader in. She bravely raises difficult issues, looks at them squarely, with intelligence and compassion. --Charlotte Houde Quimby New Hampshire State Representative Laurie Levinger is a retired psychotherapist who lives and writes in Vermont. She is the author of What War? 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An alcoholic archer, an over-zealous rabbi, a nervous shepherd boy, and an overweight farmer have further plans for Yeshua and his brother, Theudas. Each of them will discover that the kind of justice you win depends on how you fight for it. Violent revenge, passive resistance, or reluctant acts of terror? Each will bear its own fruit.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52600044388625,"sku":"NLS9781498257206","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781498257206.jpg?v=1783683528"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/emerald-city-books-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}