Booker's Point

Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2015.
Winner of the Book Award for Poetry, Maine Literary Awards, 2017.

Bernard A. Booker, old Maine codger and unofficial mayor of Ell Pond, knew the right ways to dig an eight-foot hole, build a maple sugar house out of a water heater, and snatch good white granite from other people’s back lots. The wry Yankee woodsman is the subject of Booker’s Point, an oral history-inspired portrait-in-verse. Weaving storytelling, natural history, and the poetry of place, this collection evokes the sensibility of rural New England, meditations on home and elders, and, above all, the pleasures of a good story.
 
From “Some Kind of Hunter”
 
He coaxed a pregnant woman right across
the river, and it weren’t no easy bridge.
A cousin of an in-law, broke as dirt,
she come up visiting from Vermont too poor
to buy a license. Booker paid it, set
a rifle in her hands, and took her up
to Perkinstown, the brook side, where they come
upon 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

Raised in Maine, MEGAN GRUMBLING lives by the sea in Portland. Her honors include the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, and Scotland’s Hawthornden Fellowship; her poems have appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review,Memorious, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England.