Maxine Kumin

"In July 1998, Maxine Kumin suffered a terrible accident when her horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic. Ninety-five percent of such victims die before reaching the emergency room. Of those who do survive, ninety-five percent are paralyzed for life. But Kumin, less than a year later, was pronounced "a miracle."". "This is the journal of her astonishing recovery. Though at first words threatened to elude her, writing (at first by dictating) became a way of maintaining her sanity. Kumin tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during the weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation. During the long evenings she gets hooked on the Red Sox, muses on the state of the world, and forms lasting "rehab" friendships. She salutes the loving family who always believed she would heal and who "kept the garden going as a way of keeping me going.""--BOOK JACKET.

"The story is set in Montandino, an imaginary town in the Southwest. The Latino chief of police is the most powerful figure in the town, which houses little besides the Graysmith Research Laboratory and the Hammerling Engineering School. During the search for a missing research monkey, the police chief finds the body of the lab director in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments. The director's young graduate assistant is found murdered a few days later. Is there a connection between these two deaths? Matters are complicated by The Mercy Bandits, animal rights terrorists modeled after The Band of Mercy, a 19th century group which rescued cart horses in London from abusive drivers."--BOOK JACKET.

Nearly twenty years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin transplanted her urban family to an overgrown New Hampshire farm. Her latest prose work, a graceful and appealing blend of ten essays and eight stories, grew from the exertions and exhilarations of country living. Now a consummate horsewoman, Kumin here revels in the long-awaited birth of a foal; the rehabilitation of an abused mare; and such daily pleasures as the antics of Rilke, "the Poet's Dog," and the tactile beauty of home-grown vegetables. Kumin also muses on the process of writing, as inspired by the natural rhythms of farm life. Her stories, always underscored by a profound attachment to the natural world, focus subtly on personal relationships - as between a young naturalist and her widowed father; or a love affair between a hunter and a radical environmentalist. Full of anecdote and advice, love and grief, these pieces showcase one of our most versatile and deeply passionate writers.

Caesar sets out to discover if he is a white dog with black spots or a black dog with white spots, but asking other black and white creatures only confuses him further.

"From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work. Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets" --

When Grandmother Kate was a little girl in Boston in the 1920's, life was typified by pushcarts, market day, ice wagons, and Mother's determination to cut her hair, shorten her skirts, and vote for President.

Harry the Horse excels at calming skittish equines in Adams & Son's show-horse barn, but he faces a different challenge when mischievous six-year-old Algernon Adams the Third arrives.