It’s a day of something for everybody, with a love letter to Lake Superior’s South Shore, a novel about romance and reindeer herds, and another featuring 50 poets writing about 50 poets.

“Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore”: by Sue Leaf (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95)

In our years on the South Shore, we have learned an intimacy with Lake Superior that we couldn’t have developed in weeklong vacations to Ontonagon or to the North Shore. We have seen it stormy and worry about the freighters that steam by in shipping lanes ten miles from us. We have seen it restless, bestowing on us a sense that change is imminent. We have seen it placid as a small pond, shimmering with summer heat and making us drowsy as we lounge on its shore, or beckoning to us to launch a canoe and inspect the shoreline, since paddling would seem effortless. — from “Impermanence: Life and Loss on Superior’s South Shore”

Sue Leaf (Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

Most Minnesotans know about the North Shore of Lake Superior, where rocky cliffs and deep, cold water inspire awe. But we know less about the big lake’s South Shore, spanning from Superior, Wis., across the entire northern edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There we find wide sandy beaches and red clay bluffs, Sue Leaf writes in this collection of personal essays about life and history of the area around Port Wing, Wis., where the author and her family have owned a cabin for 35 years.

Leaf, who was trained as a zoologist, looks back to the days when La Pointe was home to the Anishinaabe and talks to a woman who today is finding her culture by learning to harvest wild rice. The author traces development  and chronicles the long battle the National Park Service had to designate parts of the area as protected national shoreline in an effort to “rewild” the scenic areas that provide sports opportunities now.  But the effort came at a cost — buyouts of dozens of cabin owners, some of whom had been residents for generations. The author is skeptical that we can ever return this populated area to what it once was because, she and her family learned, the forces of Lake Superior make the South Shore ever-changing. Its impermanence is what interests her.

“As we settled into what we hoped would be idyllic summers on Lake Superior, we soon found out that the impermanence was built into the lake’s relationship with its southern shore,” she writes. “Impermanence, of course, is part of life. Nothing lasts forever. When one is young, one tries to minimize that fact, but Superior reinforced it in a way that commanded our attention.”

For one thing, the family never knew how much beach they would see from year to year. Sometimes “it was broad and open, a ‘Chariots of Fire’ beach in miniature; sometimes it was narrow and hugged the cliff, studded with cobbles.”

Will they have a beach in the future? Leaf writes of erosion that she believes cannot be stopped. She was assured that it would take 100 years for erosion to reach their cabin; now she is not so sure.

The South Shore has been exploited for centuries by profit-seekers who controlled copper mining, fishing and other resources. Leaf understands the toll these businesses took on the environment, but she also laments the disappearance of “vibrant cultures” of the men and women who lived in fishing and mining villages.

Leaf’s publisher aptly calls this book “part memoir, part travelogue, part natural and cultural history.” She clearly loves the big lake’s history and people who have lived along its shores.

Among Leaf’s previous books are “The Bullhead Queen” and the 2021 Minnesota Book Award-winning “Minnesota’s Geologist: The Life of Newton Horace Winchell.”

“The End of Drum-Time”: by Hanna Pylvainen (Holt, $28.99)

Hanna Pylvainen (Beowulf Sheehan / Macmillan Publishers)

This novel of the far, far north created buzz from critics well before it was nominated for a 2023 National Book Award. Written by a member of the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA for writers, it’s the story of a young reindeer herder and a minister’s daughter in 19th-century Arctic circle. It starts slowly, as the Lutheran minister known as Mad Lasse is welcoming his congregation, which includes Sami reindeer herders he is trying to convert. But the Sami come mostly to trade gossip about other people’s herds. The plot picks up when one of the most respected herders leaves his animals in the care of his impetuous son, Ivvar, who meets Mad Lasse’s daughter Willa. The young woman follows him and other herders in their annual migration north to the sea. “The End of Drum-Time” was named Best Book of 2023 by NPR, Time, the Christian Science Monitor, Vox and Kirkus Reviews and named a most anticipated book of 2023 by Elle magazine. It also earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Book Page.

The National Book Award citation for choosing the novel as a finalist said: “In prose that is both luxuriant and precise, (the author) vividly transports the reader to the remote Scandinavian tundra of the 1850s, introducing complicated characters who reveal their deepest joys, sorrows, fears, and hopes. This stunning novel manages to explore major themes of identity, race, politics, and faith, all while putting the focus firmly on the human stories at hand. ‘The End of Drum-Time’ masterfully takes us to a place, people, and time unfamiliar to most readers but one that becomes completely alive — and closely mirrors the most divisive and potent aspects of our contemporary lives.” (Winners of 2023 National Book Awards will be announced Nov. 15.)

“Raised by Wolves: Fifty Poets on Fifty Poems”: (Graywolf Press, $17)

In this anthology from Graywolf Press, celebrating its 50th year of publishing, Graywolf invited 50 poets published by the Minneapolis-based literary press to select and write about poems they love by other Graywolf poets. This anthology “celebrates connections and linages across fifty poems and fifty brief and luminous essays about them,” writes Graywolf’s director/publisher Carmen Gimenez in her introduction. “The selections and reflections reveal what poets read and we learn how different poets dig into their enchantment, their unsettling. These short essays are like ekphrastic poems, or odes, or elegies, or fan letters. Erika L. Sanchez takes a synthetic joy in a poem by Diane Seuss. Donika Kelly describes learning the power and careful attention to the line and stanza break through Natasha Trethewey’s epistolary poem ‘January 11.’ ”

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