Working Waterfront

Carolyn Chute returns with character-rich new novel

Review by Tina Cohen In the world of contemporary Maine literature, Carolyn Chute is a prolific and highly original author. Best known for her first novel, subsequently made into a movie, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), she has written six more since then. Born in Portland in 1947, she… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Mythic story-poems of spirit and survival

Review by Carl Little In a documentary about his life and work, award-winning Native-American writer N. Scott Momaday stated, “There is no such thing as poetry in Indian traditions.” Interviewing him in March, NPR reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked him to explain. “It’s a storytelling tradition,” Momaday said, “so you have… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

The wrath that follows environmental sin

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Bill McKibben; Henry Holt and Co., New York, 2019; 300 pages, hard cover, $28. Review by Dana Wilde Recently, a lobsterman from Swan’s Island told a reporter that, despite scientists’ finding that climate change has driven lobster populations north from… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Olive ages, and faces regret

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (2019) Review by Tina Cohen You’d need a good memory or having both books (in hardbound) to realize this: Elizabeth Strout’s collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, featured a single green leaf. And on the cover of her newest, Olive, Again, falling leaves… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Giving voice to emotional response to climate change

A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis Meghan Sterling and Kathleen Sullivan, eds. Littoral Books, Portland, Maine, 2019 Review by Dana Wilde “No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do,” David Wallace-Wells says in his chilling book about climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth.… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

A fully engaging read on half-modeling

Half-Hull Modeling: Step-by-step companion, from plans to finished model By Greg Rossel/Greg Rossel Boat Carpentry Reviewed by David D. Platt We’ve all admired half-hull models of ships and small boats. Some of us have wondered why and for whom they were made. Still fewer of us have asked how this… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Islander discovers the joys of backwoods snowmobiling

Making Tracks by Matt Weber Islandport Press, 2019 Review by George Smith This guy snowmobiles in all of Maine’s best places Even though I don’t snowmobile, I really enjoyed Matt Weber’s book, Making Tracks, published by Islandport Press. Although he lives on Monhegan, he snowmobiles all over Maine, and his… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Living in, and with, a lighthouse

The Lighthouse & Me: History, Memoir, & Imagination By Jeffrey Burke Review by Tina Cohen It isn’t always the case that storytelling in support of a larger purpose—fundraising for example—can stand on its own as a satisfying literary experience. But The Lighthouse & Me: History, Memoir, & Imagination pulls off… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

New collection splits open from-away, native identities

North by Northeast: New Short Fiction by Writers from Maine and New England Agnes Bushell, editor/Littoral Books, Portland, 2019 Review by Dana Wilde In the 1980s, a minor civil war was waged in Maine’s literary subculture over who, exactly, was eligible for the label “Maine writer.” As I recall there… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Poems of perception and place

Quarry: The Collected Poems of Peter Kilgore -- North Country Press, 2019 Review by Carl Little Over the last half century or so a number of major American practitioners of innovative verse have found a home and/or muse in Maine. The list includes George Oppen, Donald Wellman, Sylvester Pollet, Denise Levertov, Theodore… SEE MORE