By candidly sharing her own joys, heartaches, triumphs, and failures, Mandisa shows women that they can be beautiful at any size and that healthy self-esteem and personal beauty come only when they accept themselves as a unique and much-loved woman of God's creation. Mandisa also gives readers a very candid, behind-the-scenes look at life as an American Idol contestant.

For more than a decade, the Barbican Young Poets programme has served as a base for experimentation, creative development and an ever-extending community of poetic practice. Inaugurating a collaboration between Barbican Young Poets and flipped eye publishing, ARTICULATIONS FOR KEEPING THE LIGHT IN collects and celebrates work produced by poets of the 2022 cohort. In a dazzling array of poetics and forms, ranging from the mechanics of crossword puzzles, erasure and language to techno inflected sensuality, prayer and the personal dynamics of light, these poems continue to extend the legacy the programme has established and showcase the potency and integrity of contemporary poetry.

It's summertime in the city and Walter is resting on a wooden bench by a canal, enjoying the cool of a shaded footpath. Here he considers his immediate future now that his student days are over. Walter is just one of a group of young people who are starting out in life. We follow the progress of their careers and interests, and the ups and downs of their relationships. We get inside their minds, probe their motives and examine their experiences. How will they fit into society? Do they turn out to be successful and well-balanced people? What do they learn? This is life in the raw - it's never an easy ride, is it?

Those who have authority over me are agents of change in my life; everything works out well in the end, if not, then it is not yet the end. Life begins during conception - growing slowly in the womb, it bursts out at birth and ends silently when death creeps in. The long period between birth and death is what we commonly call "life" that is the period when we exist to witness and execute all sorts of atrocities and conversely, the revered measures the world has to offer. It makes us ride the wave and live on the surface, missing out on our gifts. Looking back to where I came from - the unpleasant times, the appalling, dreadful years of my miserable past, the times when I was deprived, dispossessed and cast out by the ones I considered to be dear to me - causes inevitable streams of tears run down my cheeks. In my mind, I relive the pain, my wounds bleed again, but in my heart, I have found peace and healing, brought forth by gradually learning to forgive. Countless, excruciating memories run around in my head, reminiscent of a young girl who was physically and emotionally abused beyond repair in every aspect. It is difficult for me to look at the scars that I still carry with me today. Memories of sleepless nights and sobbing in silent whimpers, memories of involuntary fasting and frailty - such recollections haphazardly flash in and out of my mind, and each giving a gravely melancholic sensation - most would imagine this to be yet another farfetched folktale. How do you recover from a wound that is within? How do you ever rise up and walk when you have been mutilated down to your feet? How do you ever recover from public humiliation? How do you restore your sense of being when your dignity has been ripped apart? How do such pains heal? Do they ever? I once heard from an old woman, that life has its rises and falls, but how deep do we ever get, and how difficult does it become to rise again? Yes, we do fall and it is natural to most of us to succumb to it and give up; on the other hand, hard as it is I believe - it is always rewarding to soldier on, fight, stand for the truth and defy failure. It fuels me to look at so many people that have lived their lives like combatants. The black woman, who refused to sit at the back of the bus, be separated, and judged by the color of her skin during the race struggle in America. The man who endured twenty seven years of his life behind bars and never capitulated, the man who was mocked, scorned, ridiculed and was crucified for edifying the truth, and many more who have been militants and fighters because they believed. When life takes you through its rapids, the avalanches, falls, ups and downs, it is wise that you gain strength through it all, because, behind every great achievement celebrated and triumph commemorated, lies challenges, thus, unless we stand for the truth and fight on, that moment of greatness shall never come to us - besides if you pursue complete authenticity, you are bound to offend a large number of people. This is when the question arises, "Where do you get the strength?"

This volume explores some of the key features of popular politics and resistance before and after 1994. It explores continuities and changes in the forms of struggle and ideologies involved, as well as the significance of post-apartheid grassroots politics. Is this a new form of politics or does it stand as a direct descendent of the insurrectionary impulses of the late apartheid era? The scale of popular protest in the 2000s does not rival that of the 1970s and 1980s, but posing questions about continuity and change before and after 1994, as some of these papers do, in itself raises key issues concerning the nature of power and poverty in the country. Contributors suggest that expressions of popular politics are deeply set within South African political culture and still have the capacity to influence political outcomes. Some chapters address pre-1994 conflicts and movements, some post-1994, and some straddle the two periods. The introduction by William Beinart links the papers together, places them in context of recent literature on popular politics and "history from below," and summarises their main findings, supporting the argument that popular politics outside of the party system remains significant in South Africa and have helped to influence national politics. The roots of this collection lie in post-graduate student research conducted at the University of Oxford in the early twenty-first century.