An interconnected web of lives in one midwestern city captures the surprising humanity of people searching for their authentic selves amid the 1990s drug crisis. Amy Taylor finds the inner-city streets around her high school vibrant and animated compared to the bland middle-class neighborhood where she lives with her career-driven mother. In these streets, she meets the people of the city, among them a wayward boy named Jonathan, a struggling drug dealer, and Paul Lewis, a documentary photographer who becomes Amy's mentor. Under his inspiration, she attempts to capture their world through the lens of her camera. From the multiple perspectives of Amy and the expansive group of people she meets, award-winning novelist Michael Henson presents a heartbreaking portrait of the effects the Reagan-initiated drug war had on the young.

Set in Appalachian Ohio amid an epidemic of prescription opiate abuse, Michael Henson's linked collection tells of a woman's search for her own peculiar kind of redemption, and brings the novel-in-stories form to new heights. Maggie Boylan is an addict, thief, liar, and hustler. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and resilience. The stories follow Maggie as she spirals through her addictive process, through the court system and treatment, and into a shaky new beginning. In these masterful stories, we rarely occupy Maggie's perspective, but instead gain a multilayered portrait of a community as we see other people's lives bump up against hers-and we witness her inserting herself into their spheres, refusing to be rebuffed. The result is a prismatic view of a community fighting to stay upright against the headwinds of a drug epidemic: always on edge, always human.

The qualitative aspects of music--what it sounds like, how expressively it is played--are every bit as important as quantitative matters--form, key, pitches, and note-values. George Pratt focuses on music's expressive nature, with games, experiments, and exercises to open our ears without being overburdened with terms and technicalities. Although primarily aimed at music students and their teachers in sixth-forms, universities and conservatoires, this book contributed to, and reflects, the National Curriculum in Music, while relevant to any inquisitive listener, at home or in the concert hall. Previously published by Open University Press, this new edition has been fully revised for publication by Oxford.

Set in Appalachian Ohio amid an epidemic of prescription opiate abuse, Michael Henson's linked collection tells of a woman's search for her own peculiar kind of redemption, and brings the novel-in-stories form to new heights. Maggie Boylan is an addict, thief, liar, and hustler. But she is also a woman of deep compassion and resilience. The stories follow Maggie as she spirals through her addictive process, through the court system and treatment, and into a shaky new beginning. In these masterful stories, we rarely occupy Maggie's perspective, but instead gain a multilayered portrait of a community as we see other people's lives bump up against hers-and we witness her inserting herself into their spheres, refusing to be rebuffed. The result is a prismatic view of a community fighting to stay upright against the headwinds of a drug epidemic: always on edge, always human.

Both a memorial and a call to awareness, these poems were written in response to the death of a friend. Buddy Gray, a grassroots activist and co-founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, was shot by a former client a decade ago in Cincinnati. Many questions remain about the killing of this man that sparked a funeral march of over two thousand mourners through the streets of the city. Some of the poems deal directly with Gray and his murder, while others take off in different directions: on the nature of grief, poverty, and the environment; on homelessness and its effect on the spirit; on sacrifice; and on the creation of a common voice.

In his invocation, the poet calls on the spirits of heroes and the artists who stand behind them:

Debs and Tubman, King and Neruda
Whitman, Lorca, and Florence Reece.
Tom McGrath and Joe Hill, I call
William Blake and Aunt Molly Jackson.

Echoes of their voices, as well as those of Tennyson, Vallejo, Ginsberg, and Dickinson, can be heard throughout the book. Weaving through them all, one encounters a pair of watchful crows, a corvine chorus announcing each section of the work. Crow Call can be read either as a meditation on injustice or an extended elegy in the tradition of "In Memoriam," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," and "Kaddish." Regardless of how it is read, it touches the heart.

This sinewy novel chronicles life on a wrecking crew in the Over-the-Rhine neighbourhood of Cincinnati - the battles men fight with society, each other, and their own minds.