front cover of Mary's Wild Winter Feast
Mary's Wild Winter Feast
Hannah Lindoff
University of Alaska Press, 2014
When winter rain washes away Mary’s chances for a sledding day, she thinks there is no hope for excitement. But with a little imagination and a brimming pantry she soon finds herself caught up in a colorful journey.  Together with her father she relives five Alaska adventures, each uniquely inspired by a jar in her pantry. From salmon to blueberries, each lively tale introduces young readers to Mary’s homeland and invites them to learn about how different places can produce different foods.

Featuring brilliant collages from artists Nobu Koch and Clarissa Rizal, Mary’s Wild Winter Feast is a celebration of food, family, and finding fun in unexpected places.
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front cover of Metabolics
Metabolics
Poems
Jessica E. Johnson
Acre Books, 2023
In this debut poetry collection, a single speaker tries to control her body and negotiate her time with digital devices, all the while navigating identities, impulses, and relationships that are often in tension.

Metabolics, a book-length poem, borrows the movements of metabolic pathways to consider how nature accomplishes both balance and deep transformation. In visual figures and prose blocks that bridge the divide between poetry and nonfiction, Jessica E. Johnson employs scientific idioms to construct an allegory about a family in the Pacific Northwest. The region becomes a character in its own right, with cedars, moss, and heavy cloud knitting the mother, father, boy, and girl into their setting.

This far-reaching volume also serves as a study of the ecologies of contemporary parenting, with adults and children affected by “feeds” both on screen and off as their bodies metabolize food, the environment, and excess feelings such as rage. From climate change to kombucha to smartphones and curated produce, the smallest details of daily life in “Plasticland” catalyze a larger examination of selfhood: “Despite so many attempts to resolve this tension, sometimes you are you and also sometimes mother just as light can be both particle and wave.”
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front cover of Minnesota’s Changing Geography
Minnesota’s Changing Geography
John Borchert
University of Minnesota Press, 1959
Minnesota’s Changing Geography was first published in 1959.This book is intended to help children understand how the state of Minnesota developed as it did, what it looks like today, and why. The story, pictures, and maps tell of Minnesota’s changing geography, but the subject embraces a good deal that lies beyond the boundaries of one state. The settlement of the land, its industry and commerce, its climate - these and other parts of the story give young readers perspective to see Minnesota as part of the larger community of the nation and the world. By showing how the land and its use have changed, the book also helps children to realize that their environment is not static, but constantly changing.In each section of the book, the author describes the characteristic features of a major region or settlement of the state. He shows why the dairy region, the corn belt, the timber country, the mining range, and other important economic areas developed in their distinctive ways. He describes the various kinds of settlements to be seen in the state - farm-trade villages, towns, cities, and suburbs. He traces the networks of transportation - rail routes, waterways, truck routes, pipelines, airways, and city traffic. Finally, he explains the elements of local, state, and federal government.A series of tables at the back of the book provides statistics on Minnesota’s population, county by county, on area, temperature, and rainfall, and significant dates in the state’s history.For children in the classroom, in the library, or at home, here is Minnesota in its physical, real-life sense, presented as a part of a large and changing world. Readable, authentic, up-to-date, the book was prepared with the help of consultants from the Minneapolis public schools.
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front cover of Mogollon Communal Spaces and Places in the Greater American Southwest
Mogollon Communal Spaces and Places in the Greater American Southwest
Edited by Robert J. Stokes, Katherine A. Dungan, and Jakob W. Sedig
University of Utah Press, 2023

This volume presents the latest research on the development and use of communal spaces and places across the Mogollon region, located in what is now the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico. New data demonstrate that these spaces and places, though diverse in form and function, were essential to community development and cohesion, particularly during critical formative periods associated with increasing sedentism and farming, and during comparable periods of social change.
 
The authors ask questions crucial to understanding past communities: What is a communal space or place? How did villagers across the Mogollon region use such places? And how do modern archaeologists investigate the past to learn how ancient people thought about themselves and the world around them? Contributors use innovative approaches to explore the development patterns and properties of communal spaces and places, as well as how and why these places were incorporated into the daily lives of village residents. Buildings and other types of communal spaces are placed into broader cultural and social contexts, acknowledging the enduring importance of the kiva-type structure to many Native American societies of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.

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front cover of Muscadine
Muscadine
A. H. Jerriod Avant
Four Way Books, 2023
A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin    [that] teeth / pierce    breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and forever: “Look / how pops left    before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds remembrance: “Listen, / how the voice    of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me    a bag / I can fit    in my heart.”
 
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front cover of Muscadine
Muscadine
A. H. Jerriod Avant
Four Way Books, 2023
A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin    [that] teeth / pierce    breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness of deficit and bounty — appetite pains the stomach and delights the palette. In all seasons, the tongue’s subversive intelligence sculpts this masterwork of love, grace, conflict, and grief. This book tastes summer and the “ruins of / an afternoon” at once; it explores the language that testifies to loss while illuminating the abundance that loss obscures. Avant accentuates the sonic joys that Black Southern voices bring to bear on memorializing the present and commemorating the past. Don’t forget, he tells us. “Look how I hunger where // there is no hunger.” See how the weather changes swiftly and forever: “Look / how pops left    before we // thought he was done.” But notice, too, how an echo sounds remembrance: “Listen, / how the voice    of a dead man // can live.” He commands us to take the brief blooms with us, says, “Pack me    a bag / I can fit    in my heart.”
 
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