Uncharted Waters

It's 1805 and André, now 16, desperately wants to paddle with French-Canadian canoe brigades-maybe his last chance. But choosing to tend to his ailing foster parents, he relinquishes his clerk's position at a fur trade post in the vast Canadian wilderness.

When a British officer taps him to organize and lead a single express canoe headed for a military post on Lake Huron and transport a small boy and his companion instead of trade goods, André leaps at the opportunity. He expects a simple journey-except that this late in the season few voyageurs are available. Except that water levels are much lower than he realized. Except that they're alone, without other canoes to rely on. And he's never led a brigade.

Uncharted Waters is André's third adventure-a teen battling the uncertainties along the rivers-and plumbing his own depths. Waters Like the Sky (Book 1) chronicles his entry into the fur trade to find a long-lost brother. In Treacherous Waters (Book 2), his literacy skills are in demand when a nearby trader dies and André must trek alone across a winter wilderness to head a post of experienced voyageurs.

When 17-year-old Violet Prestegard began working on a farm for a woman who was ill, near Millerville, Minnesota, in 1938, she had no idea how hugely her life would change. As she wrote in her diary April 22, Started flirting with the bosses' son... And two days later added, I love him (Raymond Koeplin) like I never loved anybody ever before. Ray also declared his love for her, and they decided to get married. Despite struggles with both sets of parents, they prevailed, and five weeks later got married, both continuing to declare their undying love almost daily.

Until four months later, as Vi was learning to drive, she had an accident, rolled the car, was thrown out, and pregnant, died in the hospital several hours later, leaving distraught Ray, already suffering from extremely painful Staphylococcus pyemia (curable today.) attempting to alleviate the pain, he took all manner of pain drugs, and despite efforts, died three years later. both are buried in the Millerville Seven Dolors Cemetery.

Ray continues the diary with his entries that a reader will share with him to the end.

The Diary of Star-Crossed Lovers depicts not only the loving relationship between Violet

Prestegard and Raymond Koeplin, but reflects on what life was like in the late 1930s in rural Minnesota, with people helping each other, what they did for fun, and a huge amount of visiting back and forth.

Miriam Sagan brings the strength of her curiosity, a refreshing coldness, and an expansive awareness of history - personal, ancient, and scientific - to her encounter with her own mortality in this moving collection, Thanks for Stopping By.

After receiving a frightening diagnosis, Sagan tracks the shifting moods of a life lived near death: its pleasures and amusements, irritations and confusions. Here love, family, memory, travel, and the unfathomable quotidian unfold alongside her contemplation of dying. These beautiful and often funny poems send reports from the border of life and death, a border we're all traveling towards.

Linda Huff is a 73-year-old grandmother and have been writing poetry for about seven years. She gets her inspiration from current events, nature, plus personal experiences. An idea or a phrase will pop into my head and I will go from there. I have gone through many pens and journals composing my poems. Lots of torn-up pages and scribbled out lines, but that is how I get to the finished poem. Dedicated to: my sister from another mother.

Lorrie Smith grew up in the Midwest. In a big (poor) family of four brothers and two sisters, and because the winters were long and cold, to keep children from being bored, they became creative and played games like Let's Put It Together, which is what this book is about. Lorrie said, Playing that game brought smiles and laughter into our home. So she thought she'd share the fun with other children, parents, and grandparents, to spread the joy of compound words. Lorrie created all the drawings, and continues to draw in her Minnesota home for future versions of this book. The pages are large enough for even the smallest youngsters to see what each page is about. Each page has two color pictures that youngsters have to identify, with the first player saying what the first picture is, and then the second youngster identifying the second picture. Then the youngsters combine the words from the pictures and together say what the compound word is, amidst clapping. Lorrie said, Kids are all special. This game is a way to turn off the TV and play, read, and communicate with youngsters while challenging the mind. Teach and learn with children. Play at home, in the car, at appointments while waiting. Any time is right. Please enjoy Let's Put It Together. Clap clap.

In these elegant, sparkling poems, Maya Janson writes about life's contradictory, mercurial nature with wit and warmth. Her imagination is expansive, her images surprising and delightful. Beware the urge to haul everything you own/ to the top of a mountain in order to hurl it, she writes in 'Pushing the Dead Chevy.' The poems in On the Mercy Me Planet, personal and intimate, ponder the duality in daily life, that it is both traumatic and triumphant, that we understand and yet know nothing. In mythology the pomegranate/is said to signify the underworld. In real life, / a simple granite headstone will do. Despite death, loss, injury and breakups, diagnoses and climate change, in Janson's poems the sea still laps against the shore, the rower still goes in, out, and back in again. Find the way then lose the way. Repeat.

Everyone needs a special friend in their life. For Bella, this is Zenny, her pet cat. Zenny has always been in Bella's life, right from her birth, and Bella has grown up with Zenny always by her side. He loves her above everything, and Bella grows to love Zenny just as much as he loves her. Together, they have so many special moments.

Despite the life-altering trials in Bill Vossler's life - being abandoned by his father at age three, the painful Biblical rantings of Apocalypse Granny, and the effects of an alcoholic home - he was saved by an empty lot across the street where he discovered fossils identified by the Smithsonian, a curiosity and love of nature, creating his own baseball stadium, delivering newspapers, and reading, all of which nurtured in him a joy of being alive. Each vivid episode in this memoir is a thread that entwines with others to illustrate the rich tapestry of his zest for life.

In Woman with a Tree on her Head, Patricia Corbus writes about the enchanting, troubled beauty of the world and human life in these lyrical poems of grace and distinction. Sly and funny, a little baroque, a little surreal, accepting and generous, her poems spark with surprises.

Please let me hear from you.
Slip a letter under my door,
smoke an exploding cigar with me,
take me out for a cherry bomb
or a Molotov cocktail.

Humor pops up like a hand reaching out to shake you into joy, as in the ending to Advice for a Baby

Immaturity is cute, but maturity is beautiful. Love
and Horror kiss, then slap each other. Eros has arrows.
Good is more real than evil. Life is hard. Have a nice time.

The poems in Woman with a Tree on her Head contemplate the delicacy and risks of our connections to people, creatures, nature and the inevitable experiences of loss. Here the uncanny mingles with the raw beauty of the world and the power of mortality.

The sun, a gelid gold,
the lake, a nearsighted blue.
- I'm afraid
that art has nothing to do
with my story, and the end
has already happened.

The poems in Kay Cosgrove's first collection, Anybody Home? are driven by curiosity - about herself, the world, and her place in it. Witty and elegantly restrained, they ask the question: how do we live the lives we've made for ourselves? Cosgrove roams from barrooms to checkout lines to the enigma of motherhood; she is a teenager responsible for a sack-of-flour-as-a-baby, and then an adult driving a teenage babysitter home. She explores the texture of our connections to strangers, family, ourselves, and illuminates the sublime in the unimportant. The poems in Anybody Home? embrace life's sweetness and shadows. Here, the ordinary is unfathomable and the ineffable is ordinary.

At dusk last night I blew the biggest bubble
for my girls. It captured everything:
the black shutters and dead-headed geraniums,

two cars and two girls and a skinny man
pulling weeds - all of it
so hard to see

except when it floats
in a crystal ball
right before your eye.

Excerpt from God's Law is not Fully Knowable to Human Beings, Thomas Aquinas Wrote by Kay Cosgrove