On Days Like This Patricia Conner   Poetry ISBN 9780926147300 $11.95	I wanted to be an opera diva–or a midwife. I loved listening to opera, the only recorded music we had. The singing was achingly beautiful. But I couldn't sing. And I adored my two baby sisters, God's gift to me. Helping to deliver babies would be like helping God create something new. Then I realized I could become a midwife of words, and that poetry had great possibilities for echoing sounds. My poetry is musical, and poetry combines it all. ~Patricia Conner This collection of poems does combine it all, childhood to maturity, joy to despair, dreams to reality, and all that comes between, but hope, faith and love temper the extremes. It is Patricia's second poetry collection.
Calling Sharon Chmielarz   Poetry ISBN 9780926147294 $12.95	"...those maddening little women who kept calling, calling to each other..."  "Brazil, January 1, 1502,"  Elizabeth Bishop   In this collection, Sharon Chmielarz calls up the lives of those, who, in Elizabeth Bishop's words, "...kept calling, calling to each other..." They are known and unknown painters, musicians, the local beautician, islanders and immigrants. They are subjects for our attention, long overdue. These are portrait poems serving as windows into the lives of Monet's egg girl, Galileo's daughter, the Two Fat Ladies. They are a record of the people we come from, recorded in lyric and narrative, with dashes of humor and anger, love and sadness at  the irrefutable wash of history the poems find themselves in. They are women who are showcases of strength, reflection, and the ordinary transformed by the desire to be counted. They seek the remembrance due the neglected. The poet's dragnet sweeps them all in.  Sharon Chmielarz is the author of six full-length collections of poetry as well as several children's books.
Alpha Summer Greg Bernard Juvenile Fiction ISBN 0926147218 $12.95 A Return to Willow Water Jean Husby   Fiction ISBN 9780926147317 $13.95	"Several gripping threads are woven together in this honest and thought-provoking novel. At its heart, Alpha Summer is the story of a boy taking his first real steps along that treacherous path to manhood, carrying with him the burden of a tragic loss. The descriptions of wolf behavior are vivid and beautiful, and the sense of place is strong. This is a moving and suspenseful book." -Rich Wallace, author of Restless and Losing is Not an Option Alpha Summer is Greg Bernard's first novel.         While Jean Husby's second story collection's center is her fictional western Minnesota town, Willow Waterites venture away from their hometown in several stories—Malin and Johan from the General Store make a pilgrimage to Norway that is to be the watershed of their lives—Howard with over a dozen others are caught in a blizzard in a time before cell phones—Dagne finds the strength to persevere in Willow Water with the help of Karen, a friend we met in Jean's first book. In a following story, letters to Karen during Dagne's visit to her childhood home in Bergen chronicle a coincidental meeting and a new chance for happiness—Catherine's shopping spree with sisters in Minneapolis turns her orderly life as a young pastor's wife in Willow Water at least temporarily askew upon her return. We ponder along with her what will happen next—Kristen unwraps a glass ball and a garland of bells in preparation for Christmas in her own home. She is carried back to a Christmas Eve in her childhood home over the General Store so vivid that we can feel the anticipation and almost smell the coffee and taste the Norwegian cookies Jean Husby's writing nudges us to lose ourselves in reading and turning the page. Her stories are to be savored again and again.                             Penny Ortmann