Towards A Retreat

Samaa Abdurraqib

Diode Editions

Samaa Abdurraqib’s Towards A Retreat is a breathtaking book that refuses easy categorization and instead builds its own emotional and poetic terrain. With each poem, Abdurraqib invites the reader into a space of clarity, reckoning, and deep listening. This is a collection that honors complexity. It is both a meditation and a call to attention. Abdurraqib writes about grief without sentimentality, love without simplification, and Blackness with nuance and care. Her language is precise, yet expansive; rooted in the sensory world, but always reaching toward something larger. She writes from the woods of Maine, from the remembered streets of the Midwest, from cabins that do not belong to her, and from the interior spaces of the self where identity, memory, and resistance take shape.

Somewhere The Day Begins

Leonore Hildebrandt

Deerbrook Editions

"In Somewhere The Day Begins, Leonore Hildebrandt explores the world with its deep wounds and its seeds sprouting in the ground. She bears witness. She weaves personal history, fact, and fiction and creates a space where we are guided by the clarity of her language and the power of her imagination. These are poems that are unafraid to look deeply at the challenges we have faced and will face on our troubled planet. But in looking deeply, she finds a profound place of resilience in the intense gestures of living each day and in the long arc of our lives" Stuart Kestenbaum, former Poet Laureate of Maine.

Unspoken Loss: Men, Infidelity and Disenfranchised Grief

Elliott Kronenfeld

SDP Publishing

Unspoken Loss addresses the realities of infidelity with a sharp focus on the ways in which men who commit infidelities can experience personal healing. It is the first book to address all three topics of masculinity, infidelity, and disenfranchised grief together. And they must be address together in order for both partners to experience healing. Disenfranchised grief is grief that a person feels cannot be spoken. When grief is not spoken during infidelity recovery, the experience can often be interpreted by the betrayed partner as resistance to change, lack of compliance with the goals of recovery, anger, or ambivalence. This book helps both partners understand and identify the disenfranchised grief that is often present in infidelity. Sexual and emotional infidelities can happen in good relationships and good relationships can heal from infidelities if both partners are working on the healing together.

The House At Schumannstrasse 7

Edith Netter

Maine Authors Publishing

Alice and Heinrich, Jewish-Germans, were caught between two countries, two world wars, and the politics of identity. In 1915, they were in England. Heinrich, a German citizen, was sent to an internment camp. Alice fled home to Germany. At the end of the war, Heinrich, released from the camp, was able to join her. With three children, a treasured house, and a successful business, the family prospered until the Nazis took power. By 1938, Hitler had complete control over Germany. Heinrich was sent to Dachau, where he was tortured and eventually released. England granted him sanctuary and then, once again, interned him. Alice took the "sealed train," a short-lived, but life-saving service to Lisbon. Alice's story, told in her voice, is uniquely personal and accessible. You can be young or old, informed or uninformed about the Holocaust, and find this true story about the author's grandmother compelling.

Chris Mouse Dreams of Spring

Vanessa A. Newman

Illustrated by Anastasia Yatsunenko

Literal Nirvana

This is the second picture book in a series about the true adventures of a curious deer mouse in Maine who was discovered inside the author's car glove box. It is appropriate for children ages 4 to 8 and is written by Vanessa A. Newman and illustrated by Anastasia Yatsunenko. It follows the first book in the series, entitled Chris Mouse.