The First Woman


Book Description

'Jennifer Makumbi is a genius storyteller.' Reni Eddo-Lodge An intoxicating mix of Ugandan folklore and modern feminism, from a multi-award-winning author As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her – questions which the adults in her life will do anything to ignore. Where is the mother she has never known? And why would she choose to leave her daughter behind? Inquisitive, headstrong, and unwilling to take no for an answer, Kirabo sets out to find the truth for herself. Her search will take her away from the safety of her prosperous Ugandan family, plunging her into a very different world of magic, tradition, and the haunting legend of 'The First Woman'. 'In Jennifer Makumbi, we have a giant of literature living among us.' Peter Kalu, Jhalak Prize Judge A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, BBC CULTURE & IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR




Postcolonial Love Poem


Book Description

WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love.




The First Water Is the Body


Book Description

Exhibition catalogue for The First Water Is the Body, on view at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey October 9, 2021 - January 23, 2022.




Body of Water


Book Description

Twelve-year-old Ember's trailer home has been burned in a fire set most likely by her best friend, a boy whose father believes Ember's family are witches. Yes, Ember's mom reads Tarot cards as a business. Ember's friend set the fire to warn the family before his dad did something worse to them. The friend never intended to do so much damage. Now the family is homeless, and living in a campground. They have no money. Ember's beloved dog is missing. School is going to start, and Ember and her sister have no clean clothes, no notebooks. The only place Ember feels at peace is floating in the middle of the lake at the campground. She has to make a fresh start. Can she?




Watsu


Book Description

This is a book about water, about our bodies in water and how, floating and stretching one another to our shared breathing pattern, we achieve new levels of peace and oneness. Many consider Watsu the most significant advance in bodywork in our times. While other forms are based on touch, Watsu creates a more profound connection through the holding and the deep connection with the breath that being in water facilitates. The trust established combines with the relaxing effects of warm water and Watsu's moves and stretches to create a modality of extraordinary depth that has both specific therapeutic results and healing on many levels. Besides having countless applications in therapy, it brings new depths of 'connection' into the lives of the many sharing its simpler moves with family and friends. This third edition completes the first 25-year evolution of what came into being when Harold Dull started floating people at Harbin Hot Springs in Northern California, applying the stretches of the Zen Shiatsu he had studied in Japan. It illustrates, step by step, the major positions and forms of Watsu. It introduces Watsuchanics (the body mechanics of Watsu) and other developments that help students learn Watsu. More than sixteen therapists and practitioners have added contributions detailing the use of Watsu with all ages and the growing number of conditions that Watsu is proving to alleviate in clinics and spas around the world. New chapters feature Watsu with children and a form of Watsu that can be used in home spa/hot tubs. Also illustrated step by step is a complete form of Tantsu which brings Watsu's nurturing power back onto land. More than a thousand images have gone into this book to give as clear an illustration as possible of the movements and forms of Watsu and Tantsu.




Your Body's Many Cries for Water


Book Description

A preventive and self-education manual for those who prefer to adhere to the logic of the natural and the simple in medicine.




The Chronology of Water


Book Description

This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.




Reading Group Choices


Book Description




Body of Water


Book Description

A poet’s memoir of taking an unplanned trip to the Bahamas and meeting a fishing guide who changed his life: “A splendid book.”—Jim Harrison in The New York Times Book Review Chris Dombrowski, a poet and passionate fly-fisher, had a second child on the way and an income hovering perilously close to zero when he received a miraculous email: can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight to Miami. Thus began a journey that would eventually lead to the Bahamas and to David Pinder, a legendary bonefishing guide. Bonefish are prized for their elusiveness and their tenacity. And no one was better at hunting them than Pinder, a Bahamian whose accuracy and patience were virtuosic. He knows what the fish think, said one fisherman, before they think it. By the time Dombrowski meets him, though, Pinder has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. With cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the water and a tiny severance package after forty years of service, he watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by tourists he himself did so much to attract. But as Pinder’s stories unfold, Dombrowski discovers a profound integrity and wisdom in the bonefishing guide’s life. “A poet and Montana-based fly-fishing guide recounts his trip to the Bahamas, where he met an aging guide who taught him about fish and life…loosely links reflections on his experiences catching and releasing bonefish, the history and geography of the Bahamas, the construction of fishing rods, stories he has told his children, and the difference between fishing or hunting for sport and for dinner.”—Kirkus Reviews “Thematically complex, finely wrought, and profoundly life-affirming.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)




The Body Is Water


Book Description

Three months pregnant after a two-night stand, Jane Haus resigns her job teaching English to confront her ambivalence about having a baby. Drawn by an irresistible inner homing device, she returns to her childhood home on the New Jersey shore--to a gruff and eccentric father who spends his days in a room full of clocks; to her brilliant sister Bee, as efficiently organized as the summer is formless; to the blissfully hot privacy of an attic full of memories; to water. And in this chaotic season of growth Jane will try to piece together the puzzle of her family's history--searching for an understanding of the mother she never really knew...and reaching out for the solace only family can offer.