New Releases by Amber Hope

PORTRAIT OF A PERSON WHO PUSHES LOVE AWAY IN FEAR OF LOSING IT is a lyric, brutally honest, darkly funny portrait of a woman raised on violence, God, and American television, who spends her adult life trying to understand why she keeps mistaking hurt for love and keeps coming back anyway. The collection begins in a childhood of Judge Judy reruns and evangelical youth groups, where the speaker learns that love is both salvation and weapon. From there, the poems plunge into the mess of her twenties and thirties: canceled weddings, mechanical bulls, tarot readers, bar bathrooms, and overseas apartments, a long parade of almosts and not-quites. Desire is a comedy and a haunting, a high and a hangover. The speaker cheats, self-sabotages, kisses everyone at parties, learns "to eat men like air." Throughout, Correa braids intergenerational trauma, religious myth, and pop culture-Fleabag, Barbie, Sylvia Plath, country fairs, typhoon warnings, the Oscars-into an intimate, cinematic interior life. The voice is confessional and self-aware, willing to be ridiculous, horny, grandiose, and devastated in the same stanza. The speaker is bisexual, chronically hopeful, and permanently suspicious of hope; she wants to be a wife, a saint, a poet, a problem, and ultimately a person who can love without disappearing. The collection closes not with a neat redemption arc, but with a hard-won willingness to stay-inside her own body, her grief, her desire, and her life-to see what love might be if it isn''t a wound.

You couldn''t wait for potty training to be over. You thought that would be the end of it. No more baby butt-wiping for you! And then reality set in. Your child might be able to sit on the potty and take a poop, and yeah, technically he can wipe his butt. But what a mess! And even if the bathroom and the hands make it out alive and relatively clean, sometimes the underwear doesn''t fare quite as well. How many times have you found a scary mess while sorting the laundry? And how many times did you give it up for a lost cause, and so you threw the whole mess away, underwear and all? And what do you say to your child? "You need to wipe better." Yeah. That works well, doesn''t it? "So You Think You Can Wipe" might not teach your child exactly how to wipe, but it will open up the conversation in a lighthearted, funny way. It covers all the bases, will make you and your child laugh - and you will both realize that you are not alone. So, stop the skid marks and save those skivvies! Read So You Think You Can Wipe with your child today!

Manners are hip and the cat''s meow too. Here is the lowdown on what''s square and what''s cool.