For centuries the belief that God was directly engaged in our individual lives has comforted untold numbers of people, but today that belief is being challenged by many within the community of faith. The randomness of violence, innocent suffering, and inexplicable evil has pushed believers to question whether God is personal in any meaningful way. How can we believe that God is involved in our daily lives when so often God appears deaf to our prayers and indifferent to our broken world? We in the Shadow explores how or in what way God may be personal. Unless this question can somehow be thoughtfully and practically answered, faith will be viewed as an option only for those who skim over the incomprehensibly cruel surfaces of life with eyes closed and fingers stuck firmly in their ears.

In Pattern Evidence, his final collection, Michael D. Riley sifts through the evidence of ordinary life in search of the patterns that lend shape and meaning to our days. Like a forensic scientist in search of the telling clue, the poet scrutinizes his loves and his losses, and like a trial attorney in pursuit of the truth, he interrogates and cross-examines participants in his own past and in the drama of human existence. Set largely in the suburban world outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Riley’s pages are filled with friends and neighbors, lovers and grandmothers, pines and pin oaks, lawn mowers and snow blowers, all of which body forth the mystery of daily-ness. This book documents Riley’s evolution as an artist, offering poems that span his career from early to late, demonstrating the poet’s characteristically broad range of interests and, simultaneously, his constant return to those things that matter most, namely, family, faith, and his devotion to his art. Pattern Evidence constitutes the summation of a lifetime of close and careful observation, and showcases Riley’s gifts as a poet: his keen eye, his sharp wit, his capacious mind, his practiced hand, and his large heart. This book is a final farewell to and a celebration of a life well-lived and well-loved.

Liturgy is the golden chore; the ineffable becomes as practical as a calendar or a loaf of bread. The Son of God becomes the Son of Man and briefly walks among us, Love itself incarnate in the life of faith. This generous collection--in both senses of spirit and breadth--uses the liturgical year to explore the many aspects of Christian belief. In a wide variety of voices, styles, and forms, Ordinary Time (the title is deeply ironic) includes themes from the most intimate examinations of conscience to some of the knottiest theological/philosophical questions. In tones ranging from comic/satiric to meditative to ecstatic--in characters as diverse as several apostles, three different Christmas shepherds, Mother Theresa, a retired Navy cook, and a lapsed Catholic celebrity on a TV talk show--these poems cover an extraordinary breadth of faith experience, without diminishing the struggles of faith. Like Mother Theresa in "Darkness," absence and doubt have their place: they move Incarnate grace deep enough even to meet suffering and death. The ritual year that winds from nativity to death to resurrection includes each member of the body of Christ. This collection provides one pilgrim experience in memorable detail.

1.1. Steps in the initial auditory processing. 4 2 THE TIME-FREQUENCY ENERGY REPRESENTATION 2.1. Short-time spectrum of a steady-state Iii. 9 2.2. Smoothed short-time spectra. 9 2.3. Short-time spectra of linear chirps. 13 2.4. Short-time spectra of /w /'s. 15 2.5. Wide band spectrograms of /w /'s. 16 Spectrograms of rapid formant motion. 2.6. 17 2.7. Wigner distribution and spectrogram. 21 2.8. Wigner distribution and spectrogram of cos wot. 23 2.9. Concentration ellipses for transform kernels. 28 2.10. Concentration ellipses for complementary kernels. 42 42 2.11. Directional transforms for a linear chirp. 47 2.12. Spectrograms of /wioi/ with different window sizes. 2.13. Wigner distribution of /wioi/. 49 2.14. Time-frequency autocorrelation function of /wioi/. 49 2.15. Gaussian transform of Iwioi/. 50 2.16. Directional transforms of lwioi/. 52 3 TIME-FREQUENCY FILTERING 3.1. Recovering the transfer function by filtering. 57 3.2. Estimating 'aliased' transfer function. 61 3.3. T-F autocorrelation function of an impulse train. 70 3.4. T-F autocorrelation function of LTI filter output. 70 Windowing recovers transfer function. 3.5. 72 3.6. Shearing the time-frequency autocorrelation function. 75 3.7. T-F autocorrelation function for FM filter. 76 3.8. T-F autocorrelation function of FM filter output. 77 3.9. Windowing recovers transfer function. 79 4 THE SCHEMATIC SPECTROGRAM Problems with pole-fitting approach.

In Michael D. Riley's Ashore Here, here is the point where ocean and sand, both in flux, meet, and then, shifting, meet again. On the beach at Cape May or Ocean City, the poet meditates, physically and spiritually suspended between the timeless cycles of ocean and the very much timed and created world he inhabits for merely his lifetime. --Andrew Hudgins, author of After the Lost War and Ecstatic in the Poison.