Poems spanning four decades from Portland, Oregon poet and writer, David Porter. David began writing verse in high school, published his first poem "Hitchhiking In Winter" in the late 60s. He continued to write through years of raising four children and working on community projects as a way to earn a living. The poem "Thoughts While Crossing The Steel Bridge" was a runner-up in Oregon's Ben Hur Lampman poetry contest in the 1980s. With that and few other exceptions, this is his first offering from that body of work.

People talk about the cold, hard light of day. There's no escaping what you can see by it. There can be no confusing, in that early morning light, the truth with the wished-for reality of dreams. The body was still there. He was still dead. Abandoned by her lover, Manda finds solace in bird-watching, a hobby her ex-partner introduced her to. The birds provide Manda with an escape from her troubled past - and an uncertain future. But then she falls prey to the ever more sinister attentions of another birdwatcher. As the harassment builds up, she is forced to flee, and details of her complicated past start to emerge. Haunted by her tenuous relationship with her family and memories of her African childhood, Manda is struggling with the choice between safety and freedom as she tries to escape her elusive stalker. Tempted by the promise of her friend Tom's protection, she wonders if she should finally trust someone before it's too late . . . Told through the vivid images of birds, Out of a Clear Sky is an unsettling psychological thriller which will grip you until the startling, unforeseen end.

This isn't an ordinary Civil War tale. It is the all-true but little-known story of Adam "Stovepipe" Johnson-Kentucky legend, Texas hero, and Confederate cavalry officer-who boldly led the first Confederate raid across the Mason-Dixon Line to capture the thriving river-port community of Newburgh, Indiana, during the American Civil War. Not a shot was fired. With the politically divided landscape of Civil War Kentucky and the steamboat economy of the Ohio River as its backdrop, this is the historically accurate account of surprise nocturnal strikes, opportunistic military occupations, and a swashbuckling Rebel icon's daring daylight invasion into the Northern homeland that sealed the fate of western Kentucky for the remainder of the war. Vivid, thorough, and painstakingly researched, Thunder from a Clear Sky documents five critical weeks of 1862 Civil War history and shares the untold tale of one man's immeasurable impact on a nation at war. "A fascinating account of how a skilled former Indian fighter gathered a few Kentucky rebels and 'woke up' the slumbering Indiana Home Guard." -Evansville Courier & Press Book Reviews "An important and, until now, largely neglected story about the American Civil War... Thunder from a Clear Sky stands as a fresh and important contribution in a field long studied."-Professor Randy K. Mills, Ph.D., Oakland City University, author of Jonathan Jennings: Indiana's First Governor

The book: Stranger Sky to Fly’, is a collection of more than 80 philosophical, nature, love, and observational poems. Rich in diversity and creativity, the poems are evocative, relatable short pieces and night musings. The collection will leave a deep impression on the reader’s mind and soul. Love poems to flow eternally in the stream of joyous ecstasies, philosophical poems to contemplate and create new sums, observational poems that will give the reader a touch of reality.This time the poet has come up with a unique blend of prose and poetry to narrate beautiful stories in the form of a poem. This new concept will leave the heart and soul of the reader mesmerized.

This stunning book of short stories introduces the literary world to an author who writes of the outdoors with rare artistry and exactitude. John Morel Adler knows the woods, thickets, swamps, rivers, and coasts of his native Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry. He knows its wildlife and its people. These tales of outdoor life are equally and simultaneously stories of what another writer about the Southern wilderness, William Faulkner, called "the truths of the human heart in conflict with itself," and they search keenly into the meanings of life and death, youth and love, time and change.