Booker’s Point

Bernard A. Booker, wry old Maine codger andunofficial mayor of Ell Pond, is the subject ofBooker’s Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-inverse.Weaving storytelling, natural history, and thepoetry of place, the collection evokes the sensibilityof rural New England, meditations on home andelders, and above all, the pleasures of a good story. From “Some Kind of Hunter”He coaxed a pregnant woman right acrossthe river, and it weren’t no easy bridge.A cousin of an in-law, broke as dirt,she come up visiting from Vermont too poorto buy a license. Booker paid it, seta rifle in her hands, and took her upto Perkinstown, the brook side, where they comeupon this bridge, just beams and cables, rough.Full six months big, a borrowed gun; to her,that span, it looked like one hell of a stunt “Grumbling is subtle, conjures the natural worldrichly and convincingly, and her subject matter issurprising and intriguing. I also admire how shehandles meter. Nobody else that I know of is writinglike her.”—Morri Creech, judge and author of Sleepof Reason