Books by Holly Day

The comprehensive go-to guide for building keyboard skillsBeing able to play a tune on the piano can bring you a lifetime of sheer aesthetic pleasure?and put you in serious demand at parties! Whatever your motivation for tinkling the ivories, the latest edition of Piano & Keyboard All-In-One For Dummies gives you the essentials you need both to build your playing skills and expand your knowledge of music theory, from deciding what keyboard suits you best to musing on the science of what makes music so emotionally compelling.This indispensable resource combines the best of Piano For Dummies, Keyboard For Dummies, Music Theory For Dummies, and Piano Exercises For Dummies and includes practice strategies, as well as access to streaming and downloadable audio to help guide your progress. In addition to becoming acquainted with the latest in music theory, you?ll learn to develop your sight-reading skills and performance techniques ?until you can reproduce pieces flawlessly on request!* Choose and care for your keyboard* Practice until perfect* Compose your own songs* Hook up to speakers, computers, and moreLearning to play the keys is a never-ending journey of new discoveries and joy, and there?s no better companion on your voyage than this friendly, erudite, and comprehensive guide. P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you?re probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Piano and Keyboard AIO For Dummies (9781118837429). The book you see here shouldn?t be considered a new or updated product. But if you?re in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We?re always writing about new topics!

In Into the Cracks, Holly Day gives us 53 precisely crafted fragments of a carefully observed and passionate life. It's the life of a mother, a daughter, a lover, a housewife, a victim, a rebel--told in terms of concrete boots and dying butterflies, clouds of squid ink and the smudged glass of a dusty picture frame.In "Bloodlines," for example, the human impulses to procreate and to protect offspring expand to include a maple tree which "sends its helocopter seeds across the yard/ in desperation dreams of propagation." Does the tree hate the narrator/gardener who clips those seeds--or does it resign itself to sterility? Will it retaliate, tossing branches at the narrator's children during some future storm? The questions behind such questions are rich, the metaphors inventive, sometimes alarming, often humorous.In "Three Screwdriver Hello," we're warned that "I get like a razor when you say/ [you] 'understand,' mock the lonely inside me." In "Bleeding the Brakes Dry," the memory of hearing waves crash on a distant shore can become almost loud enough ("if I try hard enough") to drown out the angry mutterings of a husband out in the garage working on a car that's never going to make it back to that beach.In other poems, we learn to read cracks in pavements and in paintings, cracks made by fingernails running ragged across human skin, cracks in the facade of sanity or sobriety. As the author writes:"I have always found comfort in clutter and chaos, especially when it comes to the natural world and its constant battle with the order imposed by civilization. I delight in seeing spiders run out from underneath the sofa of a perfectly cleaned house, or watching ivy crack its way into a building's facade. For me, the pretense of order, in whatever form it takes, acts as a shield against the unpredictability and lurking chaos of the outside world. In Into the Cracks I aim to dissolve the lines between the unwritten rules which have formed our artificial environments and the reality of a chaotic universe."The cover image for Into the Cracks is a photograph of one of the author's unconventional yet emotionally intense portraits--this one done by patiently, carefully, even meditatively, using a very sharp needle to push and pull colorful threads through the interstices between warp and weft of a quite conventional piece of canvas. Holly Day captures chaos in tiny spaces and holds it there for us to see. And hear. And taste and touch and smell.

Featuring 35 self-guided walking tours in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Walking Twin Cities leads readers through interesting, scenic, and historic places.