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2023., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: QWF Fic Mic Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Dear Marian, the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century." At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem. Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them. Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves-and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set-she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one's art means, above all else, belonging to the world.
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2023., 09:43:22, Random House Canada Edition: Unabridged. Click to access digital title. Sample Summary Note: FINALIST FOR THE 2023 PARAGRAPHE HUGH MACLENNAN AWARD FOR FICTION Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Sean Michaels' luminous new novel takes readers on a lyrical joy ride—seven, epic days in Silicon Valley with a tall, formidable poet (inspired by the real-life Marianne Moore) and her unusual new collaborator, a digital mind just one month old. It's both a love letter to and an aching examination of art-making, family, identity and belonging. Dear Marian , the letter from the Company begins. You are one of the great writers of this century. At 75, Marian Ffarmer is almost as famous for her signature tricorn hat and cape as for her verse. She has lived for decades in the one-bedroom New York apartment she once shared with her mother, miles away from any other family, dedicating herself to her art. Yet recently her certainty about her choices has started to fray, especially when she thinks about her only son, now approaching middle age with no steady income. Into that breach comes the letter: an invitation to the Silicon Valley headquarters of one of the world's most powerful companies in order to make history by writing a poem. Marian has never collaborated with anyone, let alone a machine, but the offer is too lucrative to resist, and she boards a plane to San Francisco with dreams of helping her son. In the Company's serene and golden Mind Studio, she encounters Charlotte, their state-of-the-art poetry bot, and is startled to find that it has written 230,442 poems in the last week, though it claims to only like two of them. Over the conversations to follow, the poet is by turns intrigued, confused, moved and frightened by Charlotte's vision of the world, by what it knows and doesn't know ("Do you remember being born?" it asks her. Of course Marian doesn't, but Charlotte does.) This is a relationship, a friendship, unlike anything Marian has known, and as it evolves—and as Marian meets strangers at swimming pools, tortoises at the zoo, a clutch of younger poets, a late-night TV host and his synthetic foam set—she is forced to confront the secrets of her past and the direction of her future. Who knew that a disembodied mind could help bend Marian's life towards human connection, that friendship and family are not just time-eating obligations but soul-expanding joys. Or that belonging to one’s art means, above all else, belonging to the world.
![Do you remember being born? [eAudiobook]](/Library/images/~imageCT103899.JPG "Do you remember being born? [eAudiobook]")
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2015., Adult, G.P. Putnam Sons Call No: Fic Qui Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "When Ursula Kern, proprietor of the Kern Secretarial Agency, discovers the body of one of her best secretaries, she immediately suspects murder. But no one, including the police, believes her. So Ursula seeks the help of her newest and most mysterious client, Slater Roxton."--Publisher.
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2008., Adult, Atria Books Call No: Fic Mor Edition: 1st Atria Books Hardcover ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The House at Riverton is a gorgeous debut novel set in England between the wars. It is the story of an aristocratic family, a house, a mysterious death and a way of life that vanished forever, told in flashback by a woman who witnessed it all and kept a secret for decades. Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they -- and Grace -- know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight years old and living out her last days in a nursing home, she is visited by a young director who is making a film about the events of that summer. She takes Grace back to Riverton House and reawakens her memories. Told in flashback, this is the story of Grace's youth during the last days of Edwardian aristocratic privilege shattered by war, of the vibrant twenties and the changes she witnessed as an entire way of life vanished forever. The novel is full of secrets -- some revealed, others hidden forever, reminiscent of the romantic suspense of Daphne du Maurier. It is also a meditation on memory, the devastation of war and a beautifully rendered window into a fascinating time in history."--Publisher description.
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2013., Adult, Macmillan Audio Call No: CD Fic Pen Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Three Pines Volume: 9Summary Note: In Three Pines Chief Inspector Armand Gamache investigates the disappearance of a woman who was once one of the most famous people in the world and now goes unrecognized by virtually everyone except the mad, brilliant poet Ruth Zardo.
![How the light gets in [CD] : Chief Inspector Gamache novel](/Library/images/~imageCT75977.JPG "How the light gets in [CD] : Chief Inspector Gamache novel")
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2013., Adult, Minotaur Books Call No: MYS Fic Pen Edition: 1st Minotaur Books ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Three Pines Volume: 9Summary Note: In Three Pines Chief Inspector Armand Gamache investigates the disappearance of a woman who was once one of the most famous people in the world and now goes unrecognized by virtually everyone except the mad, brilliant poet Ruth Zardo.
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By Smith, Pattic2010., Ecco Call No: Bio S656j Edition: 1st Ecco pbk. ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: An artist and musician recounts her romance, lifetime friendship, and shared love of art with Robert Mapplethorpe, in a memoir that includes such influential artists as Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and William Burroughs.
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2002., McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Call No: Fic Cum Edition: Emblem editions. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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By Smith, Patti2015., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Call No: Bio S642m Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "From the author of Just Kids: the odyssey of an artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith describes this book as "a roadmap to my life." M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations. We travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. Patti Smith is a rock musician, visual artist and writer. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary merging of poetry and rock, releasing twelve albums, including Horses, which has been hailed as one of the top albums of all time. Smith had her first exhibit of drawings at the Gotham Book Mart in 1973 and has been represented by the Robert Miller Gallery since 1978. Her books include Just Kids, Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, and Auguries of Innocence"--Provided by publisher.
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-- Martyr! :By Akbar, Kaveh2024., Alfred A. Knopf Call No: NEW Fic Akb Edition: First edition. Availability:0 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
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2020., Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Call No: Bio T811m Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy."--Dust jacket.
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2020., One World Connect to this eAudiobook title Summary Note: "Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How do we speak honestly about the Asian American condition--if such a thing exists? Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively confronts this thorny subject, blending memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth"--
![Minor feelings [eAudiobook] : an Asian American reckoning](/Library/images/~imageCT101549.JPG "Minor feelings [eAudiobook] : an Asian American reckoning")
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2018., Coach House Books Call No: QWF IND 811.6 L719o Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Can poems mourn the unmourned? Obits is a collection of prose poems in which a speaker attempts and fails to write obituaries for women and others whose memorials are missing, or who are represented only as statistics. To honour by elegy: she considers victims of mass deaths, fictional characters like Laura Palmer, her aunt (a woman who she knows less about than any of the people she researches), and her own Indonesian heritage"--
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2015., Alfred A. Knopf Call No: BLK Bio S662o Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"--Provided by publisher.
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-- Priest daddy :2017., General, Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Call No: Bio L817p Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Married with five children, Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves emblematic moments from her childhood and adolescence, from an ill-fated family hunting trip and an abortion clinic sit-in where her father was arrested to her involvement in a cultlike Catholic youth group, with scenes that chronicle the eight-month adventure she and her husband had in her parents' household after a decade of living on their own. Lockwood details her education of a seminarian who is also living at the rectory, tries to explain Catholicism to her husband, who is mystified by its bloodthirstiness and arcane laws, and encounters a mysterious substance on a hotel bed with her mother. Lockwood pivots from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the deeply serious, exploring issues of belief, belonging, and personhood. An entertaining, unforgettable portrait of a deeply odd religious upbringing, and how one balances a hard-won identity with the weight of family and tradition. Patricia Lockwood was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest. She is the author of two poetry collections, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. She lives in Savannah, Georgia."--Provided by publisher.
