Books published by Counterpoint

A “blunt, bold debut memoir” of women’s lives on an army base and the intimate hardships of war and deployment on this community (Kirkus)Raised as an army brat, Angie Ricketts though she knew what she was in for when she eloped with Darrin – then an Infantry Lieutenant – on the eve of his deployment to Somalia. Since then, Darrin, now a Colonel, has been deployed eight times, serving four of those tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Ricketts has lived every one of those deployments intimately – distant enough to survive the years apart from her husband, but close enough to share a common purpose and a lifestyle they both love.With humor, candor, and a brazen attitude, Ricketts pulls back the curtain on a subculture many readers know, but few will ever experience. Counter to the dramatized snapshot seen on Lifetime's Army Wives, Ricketts digs into the personalities and posturing that officers' wives must survive daily – whether navigating a social event at the base, suffering through a husband's prolonged deployment, or reacting to a close friend's death in combat.At its core, No Man's War is a story of sisterhood and survival. As Ricketts states: "We tread those treacherous waters together. Do we sometimes shove each other's heads underwater for a few seconds? Maybe even on purpose? Of course. Are we sometimes dragged underwater ourselves by the undertow created by all of us struggling together too closely? Without a doubt. But we never let each other drown. Our buoyancy is our survival."

What had happened to my baby brother? How did a tiny little pill shatter our family? When did we first begin losing Pat? These are the harrowing questions that plagued Erin Marie Daly after her youngest brother Pat, an OxyContin addict, was found dead of a heroin overdose at the age of twenty. In just a few short years, the powerful prescription painkiller had transformed him from a fun-loving ball of energy to a heroin addict hell-bent on getting his next fix. Yet even as Pat’s addiction destroyed his external life, his internal struggle with opiates was far more heart wrenching. Erin set out on a painful personal journey, turning a journalistic eye on her brother’s addiction; in the process, she was startled to discover a new twist to the ongoing prescription drug epidemic. That kids are hooked on prescription drugs is nothing new; what is new is how a generation of young people playing around with today’s increasingly powerful opioids are finding themselves in the frightening grip of heroin.Generation Rx offers an entirely new look at what the prescription pill epidemic means for today’s youth, and the world around them.

Winik arranges her arresting portraits of the dead chronologically, spanning Friends of My Youth, Mostly in New Jersey 1958-1978, The Austin Years, Including New Orleans 1977-2009, We Were Ten Years in Pennsylvania 1999-2009, and Love in the Time of Baltimore 2009-2018. Featuring 12 additional vignettes, The Big Book of the Dead continues Winik's work as an empathic chronicler of life.

Two beautifully paired essays, "Tawny Grammar" and "Good, Wild, Sacred," serve to offer an autobiographical framework for Snyder's long work as a poet, an environmentalist, and a leader of the Buddhist community in America.

"e;The Art of Loading Brush is singular in Berry's corpus."e; -The Paris ReviewWendell Berry's profound critique of American culture has entered its sixth decade, and in this gathering he reaches with deep devotion toward a long view of agrarian philosophy. The Art of Loading Brush is an energetic mix of essays, stories, and a poem, which explore agrarian ideals as they present themselves historically and as they might apply to our work today. Filled with insights and new revelations from a mind thorough in its considerations and careful in its presentations, The Art of Loading Brush is a necessary and timely collection.