The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She’s been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a courageous activist who has spoken out on the sensitive issues that touch our national consciousness, including race and gender, social justice, protest, violence in the home and in the streets, and why black lives matter. One of America’s most celebrated poets looks inward in this powerful collection, a rumination on her life and the people who have shaped her. As energetic and relevant as ever, Nikki now offers us an intimate, affecting, and illuminating look at her personal history and the mysteries of her own heart. In A Good Cry, she takes us into her confidence, describing the joy and peril of aging and recalling the violence that permeated her parents’ marriage and her early life. She pays homage to the people who have given her life meaning and joy: her grandparents, who took her in and saved her life; the poets and thinkers who have influenced her; and the students who have surrounded her. Nikki also celebrates her good friend, Maya Angelou, and the many years of friendship, poetry, and kitchen-table laughter they shared before Angelou’s death in 2014.

Robyn R. Warhol's goal is to investigate the effects of readers' emotional responses to formulaic fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on gendered subjectivity. She argues that modern literary and cultural studies have ignored nonsexual affectivity in their inquiries. The book elaborates on Warhol's theory of affect and then focuses on sentimental stories, marriage plots, serialized novels, and soap operas as distinct genres producing specific feelings among fans. Popular narrative forms use formulas to bring up familiar patterns of feelings in the audiences who love them. This book looks at the patterns of feelings that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular genres evoke, and asks how those patterns are related to gender. Soap operas and sentimentalism are generally derided as "effeminate" forms because their emotional range is seen as hyperfeminine. Having a Good Cry presents a celebration of effeminate feelings and works toward promoting more flexible, less pejorative concepts of gender. Using a psychophysiological rather than a psychoanalytic approach to reading and emotion, Warhol seeks to make readers more conscious of what is happening to the gendered body when we read.

It takes a man to cry.Does the idea of showing emotion make you cringe?Have you ever felt like you should be crying but couldn't? Do you view crying as weakness?The misinformed cultural message out there is that men don't cry. Completely not true. Men do cry, men should cry, men need to cry. Mark Peterson, founder of ManAlive, tells his first encounters with tears and how using them well has become a lifestyle. He outlines practical steps to get guys from guarded to growing.It takes a man to cry and this book will get you there.

This Will End in Tears is the first ever and definitive guide to melancholy music. Author Adam Brent Houghtaling leads music fans across genres, beyond the enclaves of emo and mope-rock, and through time to celebrate the albums and artists that make up the miserabilist landscape. In essence a book about the saddest songs ever sung, This Will End in Tears is an encyclopedic guide to the masters of melancholy—from Robert Johnson to Radiohead, from Edith Piaf to Joy Division, from Patsy Cline to The Cure—an insightful, exceedingly engaging exploration into why sad songs make us so happy.

This thoughtful, poetic book uses metaphors and beautiful imagery to explore the reasons for our tears. In a soft voice, Mario asks, “Mother, why do we cry?” And his mother begins to tell him about the many reasons for our tears. We cry because our sadness is so huge it must escape from our bodies. We cry because we don’t understand the world, and our tears go in search of an answer. Most important, she tells him, we cry because we feel like crying. And, as she shows him then, sometimes we feel like crying for joy. This warm, reassuring hug of a book makes clear that everyone is allowed to cry, and that everyone does.

Humans are unique in shedding tears of sorrow. We do not just cry over our own problems: we seek out sad stories, go to film and the theatre to see Tragedies, and weep in response to music. What led humans to develop such a powerful social signal as tears, and to cultivate great forms of art which have the capacity to arouse us emotionally? Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Dionysian drives and music were essential to the development of Tragedy. Here, the neuropsychiatrist Michael Trimble, using insights from modern neuroscience and evolutionary biology, attempts to understand this fascinating and unique aspect of human nature--Book jacket.