How I Discovered Poetry

How I Discovered Poetry
Marilyn Nelson
811 W186ho

A unique and powerful memoir, a window into an astonishing decade, a glimpse of the awakening of artistic inspiration...

How I Discovered Poetry is the story of Marilyn Nelson's own childhood, and of America in the 1950s.  This highly decorated poet has created fifty eye-opening, intimate poems that tell the tale of her development as an artist and young womand during one of the most turbulent decades in our nation's history.  These poems, spanning her fourth to fourteenth years, touch on many aspects of the time: racism and the Civil Rights Movement, the "Red Scare," the shadow of the atom bom, and the first stirrings of the feminist movement.

This is a book to study, discuss, and treasure--a deeply felt, masterfully crafted autobiographical history.

(From publisher.)

The Sweetheart

The Sweetheart
Angelina Mirabella
Fiction M67s

It’s 1953 and seventeen-year-old Leonie Putzkammer feels destined to spend the rest of her life waiting tables and living with her widowed father, Franz, in their Philadelphia row house. Until the day legendary wrestling promoter Salvatore Costantini walks into the local diner and offers her the chance of a lifetime.

Leonie sets off for Florida to train at Joe Pospisil’s School for Lady Grappling. There, she transforms into Gorgeous Gwen Davies, tag-team partner of legendary Screaming Mimi Hollander, and begins a romance with the soon-to-be Junior Heavyweight Champion Spider McGee. But when life as Gorgeous Gwen leaves her wanting, she orchestrates a move that will catapult her from heel to hero: she becomes The Sweetheart, a choice that attracts the fans she desires but complicates all of her relationships—with Franz, Joe, Spider, Mimi (who becomes her fiercest competitor), and even with herself.

She triumphs, she fails, but somehow she manages to endure when the odds are never in her favor.  Her actions hold promise: if she can, maybe we can, too.  In a novel about wrestling, Angelina Mirabella tells a surprising, affecting, and morally complex story about the path to adulthood.

(From publisher.)