![]() ![]() He previously served as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. ![]() Stones becomes an ode to Young's home places and his dear departed, and to what of them-of us-poetry can save. Whether it's the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection), or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. "Like heat he seeks them, / my son, thirsting / to learn those / he don't know / are his dead." "We sleep long, / if not sound," Kevin Young writes early on in this exquisite gathering of poems, "Till the end/ we sing / into the wind." In scenes and settings that circle family and the generations in the American South-one poem, "Kith," exploring that strange bedfellow of "kin"-the speaker and his young son wander among the stones of their ancestors. ![]() A book of loss, looking back, and what binds us to life, by a towering poetic talent, called "one of the poetry stars of his generation" ( Los Angeles Times). ![]()
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![]() ![]() Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden-a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. You can alter someone’s feelings-and memories-but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences-but also to increase power and influence. This book includes a love story but has a cliffhanger ending, so keep that in mind. ![]() The protagonist, Charlie, lives in the world of normality, where she is a bartender hoping to put her sister through college, and the world of magic, in which she is a con artist and a thief. ![]() Holly Black’s first novel marketed for adults is a gritty urban fantasy in which magic allows people to control their own, and sometimes other people’s, shadows, and in which the rich and powerful trade in secrets and books of lore while jockeying for power. ![]() Child abuse and grooming, drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, self-harm, body modifications, cons, murders, blood, secrets, lies, theft, captivity and coercion. ![]() ![]() ![]() He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins-some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them-and escaped into the darkness. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. ![]() On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. ![]() |