Julie Weiss

Julie Weiss's collection Rooming with Elephants is suffused with love and terror. Nearly every poem clangs with this yin-and-yang of emotions, like a fire truck burning red with both emergency and promise. "Everywhere I turn, something beautiful stares / back at me, writhing, caught in the wires / of my mind," she writes in "What Am I if Not a Killer?" This poem's title alludes to the phantom killers and kidnappers stalking these poems, igniting Weiss's maternal fear in a world gone mad. She spars with these sinister shades, armed with relentlessly protective love for her children. Her voice is urgent, as if the world she loves were slipping away, no matter how hard she tries to hold on to it.-Marc Alan Di Martino, poet and translator of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'ArcoIn Rooming with Elephants, Weiss bends our gaze like a prism toward the larger world, daring the shadows that always follow light. There is vulnerability here, and courage. "I want them to hear a not-so-distant hunger," Weiss writes, "I need them to know what may come next." As mother and poet, Weiss shows us what she's learned to carry, in a moment, in a season that often comes calling with grief. "When I say I'll keep you safe," she says, "what I mean is, I'd move tomorrow"-and it's something every parent understands with a ricochet of knowing, of hunger and hope.-Rebecca Brock, author of The Way Land BreaksIn Rooming with Elephants, Julie Weiss grapples unflinchingly with the weight of what it means to be a parent in our world. These poems resist the urge to "cleanse the air with sweet fables" and instead give voice to the realities of fear, darkness, and even despair with uncompromising candor. "No one showed me the lies / I'd rinse off my mouth / when I became a mother," she writes-and the gift of this collection is embedded in that honesty: each sharp line break, every raw confession, crafts a powerful portrait of a mother's clear-eyed devotion.-Emily Patterson, author of To Bend and Braid

In Julie Weiss's poems, the speaker is haunted by "the apocalypse that threatens / to sweep across my imagination." Her poems are filled with people living in an epidemic-ravaged world, people who are disappearing, escaping, searching, desiring, loving. It's a world where women's bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies, are disciplined and punished. "We're lucky to be alive," she says, the irony of such "luck" weighing heavy on the page. And yet "alive" these poems are, crying out with powerfully beautiful language. For as the book's opening epigraph reminds us, wisdom is found in the shadows.─Kate Evans, author of Call It Wonder and TargetIn this searing collection, Weiss asks "What good is poetry when all it can do is kneel on a piece of paper and wail?" Her poems push hard against this question, giving voice and depth to the darkest places embodied in each of us, in our history, and in our culture. These poems are a reckoning. They exhume and sing griefs and traumas with such skill that they are both moan and a call to action, slicing into the reader "like an elegant blade." Time and again, with wisdom and beauty, Weiss proves that poetry is more than kneeling-it is the gift of attention, a form of allyship, and a space for those who have been silenced, displaced, or fractured. These poems are also a reminder to love, even more wildly, when what is laid out before us might be beyond repair.─Megan Merchant, author of Before the Fevered Snow (Stillhouse Press, 2020)In Julie Weiss's intimate and powerful debut collection, she asks us in a myriad of ways, "what good is poetry?" Her poems provide an answer in the evocation of the unnamable and tender places of pain, suffering, and death that mark our human lives. Her words nourish and fill us again and again.─Persis Karim, poet and editor of Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora

Growing up in Santa Monica, California, Julie Weiss would do almost anything for love. She drank, she quit school, she stole-and she ended up a mother in her teens. Years later, overweight and depressed, she put one foot in front of another and found a new road beckoning. Running gave her the answers she was looking for. Julie's loving, larger-than-life father, her biggest critic during her wayward years, became her biggest fan as his now-fit and healthy daughter began to run marathons. When he died suddenly of pancreatic cancer, she decided to turn her new pursuit into a purpose and, in his memory, embarked on an incredible endeavor to raise money and hope in the fight against pancreatic cancer. In 2012-13, Julie-a/k/a, the Marathon Goddess-ran 52 marathons in 52 weeks. Along the way she was featured in a major documentary film, Spirit of the Marathon II, appeared on national television and attracted a passionate social media following, as she logged the miles of each of her 52 marathons in honor of individuals lost to or fighting pancreatic cancer, ultimately raising over a half million dollars for the cause. It's a story of resilience, perseverance, endurance-and romance: Julie's turbulent early life; the rekindling of a father's love extinguished too soon; her epic year traveling to far-flung races and places; not to mention her relationship with coach David Levine. After a rocky road, their underlying love emerged, culminating with a finish line marriage proposal. It all adds up to make "The Miles and Trials of a Marathon Goddess" a riveting, humorous, poignant and ultimately uplifting book, for runners and non-runners alike.

Food Storage Made Easy was founded on the principals of building up a year supply of food storage in simple babysteps. There are three components to the program: Checklists, Encyclopedia, and a Recipe Appendix. BABYSTEP CHECKLISTS: The Food Storage Made Easy Program starts with a series of checklists designed to be completed every two weeks, but you can go fast or slower as desired. Each checklist gives specific food storage or preparedness items to buy, to learn about, and to try. FOOD STORAGE ENCYCLOPEDIAThe encyclopedia contains detailed information about every aspect of your food storage and emergency preparedness plans which we discuss in the checklists. If you are assigned to buy an item, you can be sure that there is an article about it in the encyclopedia. We want to make sure you have all of the information you need so that you understand what you are storing and how to use it instead of just buying a bunch of foods you can't cook. We help you know the different varieties of foods so you can choose ones that your family will enjoy and that meet the nutritional guidelines you are looking for. RECIPE APPENDIXWith 60 recipes plus food storage equivalents and substitutions charts this recipe appendix is a complete resource on it's own. For every food we instruct you to buy we give you at least one recipe you can use so you don't have to feel nervous about storing new foods you've never used before. These are family-friendly, simple recipes that should work well for anyone