Michele McDannold Livres

Dan Denton’s "$100-A-Week Motel" is a hallelujah chorus of proletariat madness, and a fine, sweet madness it is. In this modest motel, the circus comes to town, love is possible, sudden heroes wait to punch the time clock and ashtrays overflow with twice smoked twisted butts. There is a cheap bible hiding inside the table at the bedside of every room of this motel that among others, contains the outlaw gospels according to Charles Bukowski, F.A. Nettelbeck, and Fred Voss; the poetic catechism of ordinary saints. And if you press your ear to it, spirituals of the divinely real can be heard inside an earful of peeling paint. Come, let Dan Denton take you to his burning river where you can meet the practitioners of a sincere and wounded faith found only in the lobby of this $100 a Week Motel. ~ S.A. Griffin, from his foreword. Author of "Dreams Gone Mad With Hope" and editor of "Outlaw Bible of American Poetry."

Nadia Bruce-Rawlings has written a collection of stories with a dark humor and candor that only someone with a survivor’s gratitude can. She takes us on a journey that cracks open family secrets, illustrating the evolution of dysfunction from its very core. She reminds us, as children we do not get to choose our surroundings, while relying on our parents for protection, love, and nurturing, preparing us for our own adult journey into the world, and that more times than not, this isn’t the case. Because parents get abused and scarred, by their parents who got abused and scarred, by their parents, and so on. And with each generation the trauma grows, becoming a collection and a reflection of an ongoing tradition of generational abuse. This book is written based on Nadia’s experiences on the front lines of her own personal battles with child abuse, domestic violence, molestation, addiction, crime, cutting, incarceration, and recovery. After hitting a bottom so hard with only two options left, life or death. Nadia drives home the sad and brutal truth that not everyone gets that choice. Many do not live to tell. This book is written for them, an epitaph. This book is also a love letter and a promise that there is hope for a better life, written for the ones that are still out there, still fighting their way in, and not out, who have lost their way, and still collecting scars.