NCW Libraries

After the devastating loss of his father as a young boy, Peter Ranos denies the presence of God in his life and decides to take matters into his own hands. Years later, Peter's life is riddled with problems: financial ruin, unemployment, and ultimately, marital challenges. In Peter's mind, all he needs is one big break to make things right, but every time a break is near, something happens to set him back even further.

"A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from 'perhaps the best public poet we have' (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect...

"An extended reflection on finding authentic Christian joy in the midst of suffering and despair, especially the twenty-first-century epidemics of suicide and addiction"-- Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching...

We've never been more educated and entertained. We have technological tools our parents could only dream of, and we are saturated with information, amusement, and recreation. Yet more than ever, we are starving for hope. School shootings are all too familiar. Depression is on the rise. And more people than ever are orchestrating their own deaths. In America alone, the suicide rate has increased 24 percent in fewer than twenty years. If a disease saw...