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You monsoon across the alphabet, croon turbulence, and whisper: A is for alligator, against the Mississippi marooned on my gums. Gumbo thrums from lips and you drizzle glossary, soak into S like your throat gurgles the wrung-out cotton from a humid Zandunga: say S, say sathasha sashatha, say spoon. I hiss and that is all. Say S, shass shassha, say..gymnasts squat bulk quads atop your tongue, S somersaults warm into P and I geyser, hoot, o-o at this alphabetic kinetic. Say S, say shrathra shrathrashra, say spoon, your pucker hunkers in singsong. The bright, taut, explosive poems in Jordan Scott's Blert represent a spelunk into the mouth of the stutterer. Through the unique symptoms of the stutterer (Scott, like fifty million others, has always stuttered), language becomes a rolling gait of words hidden within words, leading to different rhythms and textures, all addressed by the mouth's slight erosions. In Scott's lexicon, to blert is to stutter, to disturb the breath of speaking. The stutter quivers in all that we do, from a skip on a cd to a slip of the tongue. These experiences are often dismissed as aberrant, but in Blert, such fragmented milliseconds are embraced and mined as language. Often aimed full-bore at words that are especially difficult for the stutterer, Scott's poems don't just discuss, they replicate the act of stuttering, the 'blort, jam and rejoice' involved in grappling with the granular texture of words. As Scott says in his author's note, 'Blert is written to be as difficult as possible for me to read.' Blert presents the stutter on its own terms - every tense moment of personal struggle with language as a rolling, unstoppable gallop of words within words. 'Jordan Scott's Blert is the most original poetic project I have read in years. Undertaking a "poetics of stutter," the book is not primarily a mimetic representation of stuttering, or the reproduction of stammered speech, but rather an investigation into how the stutter originates.' - Craig Dworkin

Winner of the Schneider Family Book Award Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Winner What if words got stuck in the back of your mouth whenever you tried to speak? What if they never came out the way you wanted them to? Sometimes it takes a change of perspective to get the words flowing. A New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year I wake up each morning with the sounds of words all around me. And I can't say them all . . . When a boy who stutters feels isolated, alone, and incapable of communicating in the way he'd like, it takes a kindly father and a walk by the river to help him find his voice. Compassionate parents everywhere will instantly recognize a father's ability to reconnect a child with the world around him. Poet Jordan Scott writes movingly in this powerful and ultimately uplifting book, based on his own experience, and masterfully illustrated by Sydney Smith, winner of the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international distinction given to author and illustrators of children's books. A book for any child who feels lost, lonely, or unable to fit in. Finalist for the BC and Yukon Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book An American Library Association Notable Children’s Book ILA Primary Fiction Honoree Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Awareness, Bookpage, School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Publishers Lunch, and more! A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection A Bank Street Best Childrens Book of the Year! A Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year A CBC Best Picture Book of the Year A Kids' Book Choice Award Finalist

The bond between a child and his grandmother grows as they tend her garden together. A young boy spends his mornings with his beloved Baba, his grandmother. She doesn't speak much English, but they connect through gestures, gardening, eating, and walking to school together. Marked by memories of wartime scarcity, Baba cherishes food, and the boy learns to do the same. Eventually, Baba needs to move in with the boy and his parents, and he has the chance to care for her as she’s always cared for him. Inspired by memories from poet Jordan Scott’s childhood, with beautiful, dreamlike illustrations by Hans Christian Andersen Award-winning illustrator Sydney Smith, My Baba’s Garden is a deeply personal story that evokes universal emotions. Like Scott and Smith’s previous collaboration I Talk Like a River, winner of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, My Baba’s Garden lends wistful appreciation to cherished time with family. A Charlotte Zolotow Honor Book A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of the Year A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year A Horn Book Fanfare Book A Booklist Editors’ Choice A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection An Evanston Public Library Great Book for Kids

bronchia think form a bombsight think periosteum singing particle falconry workpiece two lowcut hills seeking what stone is for body is herd alliterations Night & Ox is a long poem working its interruptions to a degree where it's broken by the will to live. A poem that invokes expansive loneliness, where the poet's emotional response is to endure. A crushed line of astral forms and anatomy in perpetual remove; it is a poem that nurtures vulnerability: some soft-footed embryo sounds against language’s viscera. Night & Ox possesses a feral minimalism for those too tired and too frantic with joy to cope with narrative. ‘A fierce, ladderlike cri de cœur – at times a cri de cur – Night & Ox pulses with sawblade nocturnes that gnaw through the very rungs on which they’re wrung. One part Jabberwocky-talkie, one part fatherhood ode, the poem seeks a threshold, where the “mondayescent” gives way to ardour, splendour, even love. Scott is a cosmoglot of the throat’s ravine, and this is his manic, pandemonic article of faith.’ – Andrew Zawacki Praise for Blert: ‘Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism.' – Dennis Lee

In this moving picture book, inspired by the author’s experience as a Syrian refugee, a child's profound love for his family's apple tree gives him courage when he must flee his homeland. When a young boy asks his parents why he doesn’t have a brother or sister, his mother replies that on the day he was born, they planted an apple tree in their front yard. “The apple tree is your sister,” she says. At night, the boy wraps a blanket around his sister's trunk and during the day he shares all of his secrets with her. One day, they see helicopters in the sky and his parents tell him they must flee. But how can he leave his sister behind? Instead he digs her up and carries her away from their homeland. When they arrive to a new place, the air is colder and the ground is hard. Home feels so far away. But as his sister grows taller and her branches blossom, the boy realizes that he will always be connected to his homeland, even as he begins to embrace his new one. This moving and hopeful refugee story is written by Syrian activist Jamal Saeed and co-written by acclaimed poet Jordan Scott. Illustrated by award-winning artist Zahra Marwan, who drew inspiration from her own immigration from Kuwait, this gorgeous book reminds readers that nothing is left behind forever.

Poetry. With his debut collection of poetry, Jordan Scott traces his own history from Vancouver to Lodz, Poland. Informed by a lifelong stutter, his family's association with the Fraser River and his grandparents' hardships in WWII Poland, SILT's poetics move from Scott's own story to the geography of his birthplace of Port Moody. This is a poetry book about the body's lived geologies. River, tongue, war, tooth, labourcamp, dollhouse, cabbage: all are part of the politics of a speech whose profoundly discontinuous landscape Jordan Scott overwrites with migratory and familial histories. Each word starts at anincarceration and haltingly enacts a survival. His kinetics are ambulatory, glottal, knotted by hope--Lisa Robertson.

As a little boys journey begins, Scott Jordan experiences continuous childhood traumas and is grief stricken by his mothers ultimate abandonment, jumping overboard to her watery death from a cruise ship. He grows up sad, confused and angry. Subsequently Scott has another personal hell to wage war with; Manic depressive illness. His life is a succession of delusional, psychotic, manic episodes and crippling suicidal depressions. He is caught in an intricate web of misfiring brain chemistry. The dawning desire to live without fear and paranoia, a few angels in street clothes, and an amazing faith, Scott discovers life, a miracle of wonder

Imagine Bill Gates and Giorgio Armani started a business, then hired PT Barnum to promote it, and Larry David to tell the story. The result is this book.Since starting SCOTTeVEST in 2000 - my clothing business built around tech-enabled pockets - I've been featured in thousands of major press pieces, made millions of dollars and had the most memorable appearance of the entire ABC Shark Tank show. I started out as an unhappy lawyer, and I reinvented myself by pursuing my passions and mastering the art of passionate, personal promotion.This isn't a how to business book, but entrepreneurs will learn a lot from my successes and failures about how to get the attention every business needs to stand above the competition.This isn't fiction, but some of the stories might make you wonder if they are true. I assure you... they are. We're going to turn the world of media upside down, shake it and see what falls out of its pockets. You will learn lots of ways to promote yourself and your business, if you have the fire.Welcome to my unauthorized autobiography.

In the space between archaeology and history stand men like Scott Jordan, a New Yorker who has been digging around in the city's soil for the better part of four decades. What began as a childhood hobby searching for treasure evolved into a lifestyle that has resulted in Jordan haunting building sites throughout the five boroughs, attempting to recover history before it is paved over forever. Using shovels, mesh sieves, canvas rucksacks, ingenuity and an incredible amount of determination, Jordan has amassed a staggering collection of antique bottles, china, toys, shoes and other items, which together create a patchwork historical narrative of New York City and its earliest settlers. As a self-trained historian and restorer of damaged objects, Jordan is not only privy to a unique take on early American history, but his adventures weave together into a tremendous factual and speculative examination of the past, by returning it to the present for all to enjoy.Past Objectsfeatures some of Jordan's favorite objects and stories, sure to appeal to anyone intrigued by history, antiques and popular culture.