Three strangers from different walks of life confront unsettling realities as they grope their way through one confounding day. Maggie, a suburban housewife with a take-charge husband she usually defers to, feels her sense of self teetering when she learns that her cognitively disabled mother and son are missing. Billy, an inner-city grocery worker who has given up on himself after an adolescence of abuse and loss, hits rock bottom while trying to help a friend pursue his dream. Eamon, whose talent and eagerness to please propelled him into a major league pitching career, goes AWOL when his long-simmering identity crisis comes to a head. By day's end, the trio stumbles upon one another and, through serendipity, and perhaps divine intervention, find much more than they were looking for.
When charismatic entrepreneur Adam Springbrook turns up dead on a crisp October afternoon, the discovery shatters Police Chief LT Nichols’ offseason peace-and-quiet. He finds that Springbrook’s plan to transform the fishing village of Laurel, Maine into a jet-set resort has nearly everyone in town on edge. Wherever Nichols turns, suspects emerge. Nothing is as it should be. And that may have dire consequences for Nichols and those closest to him.
When is it MY Turn?: How to Say NO Without Feeling Guilty (Really!)
Too many of us put the needs and happiness of others ahead of our own way too often, which often leaves us feeling angry, sad, and even powerless. How do we know when to put ourselves and our own needs, interests, and happiness first? How do we do that without feeling guilty? Counselor Cheryl Klein shares what she has learned and taught clients for more than 20 years, looking at issues like codependency, self-esteem, and strategies for managing responses to others that make it more possible to say NO when we really need to. When is it YOUR turn? How about. . .right now?!
Michelle Lewis’s Spare is a poetic memoir that weaves gripping personal history with present-day narrative. Its finely tuned lyrical text includes a meditation on the relationship between the history of eugenics in Maine with the region’s current drug epidemic, while considering complex themes of social accountability, privilege, prejudice, socio-economic class, family legacy, and the unreliability of truth. Winner of the 2023 Barrow Street Prose Book Prize, selected by Mary Cappello, Spare is by turns mysterious, humorous, and heartbreaking as it shifts from spare to expository and from sublime to urgent, constructing its own landscape that is part ballad and part riddle. Kerri Arsenault, author of Mill Town, calls the book “an elegant and elegiac seminar on class in America.” Lewis is also the author of Animul/Flame (2018, Conduit Books), which won the Midwest Book Award and was a finalist for the Maine Literary Award.
In Other Times, Midnight, her debut collection, Andrea Ballou explores the aftermath of loss—death, divorce, and departures—and asks the toughest questions: How do we contend with grief and remorse, and where does the spirit go to wait out trauma? Ballou’s poems fight an “impulse to not speak,” aware that naming, and speech itself, are a matter of life and death. Their startling and often humorous images (rooted in the fields, forests, and domesticity of rural life) are juxtaposed with oblique, and at times irreverent, adaptations of Celtic and Greek mythology and biblical stories. For Ballou, language is both tool and weapon, as useful as a hoe, needle, and sword. Caught “in the mouth of midnight,” these poems wrestle with the numinous, their voices—cranky and cajoling, yet compassionate and vulnerable—urging us toward the fullness of being human.
The Ends
Christian Barter
Littoral Books
Christian Barter is a poet who has worked for the National Park Service at Acadia National Park for the past thirty-five years as a trail crew supervisor, arborist, and dry stone mason, and his poems reflect this experience. In “Champlain,” for example, a poem that imagines the discovery of Mount Desert Island, he addresses the issue of our stewardship of the earth. The major work in this collection is a series of 34 sonnets, a masterpiece of love poetry, harkening back to Dante’s La Vita Nuova. “Barter’s conversations with himself and a whole host of influences —Robert Lowell, Thucydides, Tracy Chapman—enact the possibility for discovery that is essential to poetry” – Jeri Theriault, author of Self-Portrait as Homestead. “These are the poems of a writer sure of his craft and at the height of his skill” – Jeffrey Thomson, author of Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory.
Noah is the happy boy who lives by the sea, whom we first met in Noah and the Shark, the first book in the series. This book follows Noah through his exciting summer adventures. Noah spends his summer traveling, playing sports and spending quality time with his family. He shares his experiences with you in this colorfully illustrated book, written in a fun, rhyming style with positive messaging. See if you can spot his pal Ronnie the shark along the way!
SUBMISSIONS If you are a current Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance member, and you would like to announce your new book in ExLibris Maine, click HERE. If you are not a member, click HERE to learn more about our member benefits.
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