In the powerful poems of her fifth collection, Heather Ross Miller reveals the traps in daily life, especially those set for the innocent and the cautious - poisoned tap water, a date turned to rape, oppressive domesticity. One poem deals with the brutality of butterfly collecting and ends with a woman caught in a net, unable to breathe. In another, man-eating plants catch and devour those who pass too close. Some of the victims in Friends and Assassins contemplate the pleasures of revenge, some go beyond contemplation, but all of them gain strength by confronting the truth. With deceptively simple language and moments of wry humor, Miller sketches the dimensions of danger around us all.

When her daughters jokingly stick a Post-it note that says a born loser onto her photograph, the adult Titania is jolted to reflect on why they might, even in jest, consider her a loser. She determines to write out the story of her youthful adventures to disprove their taunt, but her memories overtake herboth of her youthful escapades and shining moment of triumph and of the bittersweet more recent events of her adult life. Though she doesn t get a word of it down, these memories become the narrative of this novel."

Fourteen stories on love and reality. In Sparkle Plenty, a man marries a woman because she is so like a girl in his favorite comic books, in Popeye the same couple divorce. By the author of Gone a Hundred Miles.

For thirteen years, Heather Ross Miller and her family lived in North Carolina's Singletary State Park, a remote wilderness fifty miles from the nearest town. This memoir, written in quiet narrative, explores her life in the park, recounting the hardships and the joys that taught her to respect both nature and the people sharing her hinterland.

Even though there is a great similarity about the houses in a small aluminum-smelting town, their inhabitants are as varied as people everywhere.