Based on actual events, this sweeping novel tells the life story of a woman who was willing to risk it all for her country and her lover--in whose legacy lies the history of an entire continent.

Our Lives Are the Rivers tells the story of beautiful young freedom fighter Manuela Saenz, and the epic tale of her long love affair with liberator Simon Bolivar. A novel of intoxicating love, passion, and adventure, Jaime Manrique vividly captures a dynamic continent struggling for its own identity.

These exquisite love poems, some of them clearly addressed to women, were written by the visionary and passionate genius of Mexican letters, the seventeenth-century nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. In this volume they are translated into the idiom of our own time by poets Joan Larkin and Jaime Manrique. Some of them are rooted in Renaissance courtly conventions; others are startlingly ahead of their time, seemingly modern in the naked power of the complex sexual feelings they address.

Fans of Jerry Apps will delight in his latest novel, Blue Shadows Farm, which follows the intriguing family story of three generations on a Wisconsin farm. Silas Starkweather, a Civil War veteran, is drawn to Wisconsin and homesteads 160 acres in Ames County, where he is known as the mysterious farmer forever digging holes. After years of hardship and toil, however, Silas develops a commitment to farming his land and respect for his new community. When Silas s son Abe inherits Blue Shadows Farm he chooses to keep the land out of reluctant necessity, distilling and distributing purified corn water throughout Prohibition and the Great Depression in order to stay solvent. Abe s daughter, Emma, willingly takes over the farm after her mother s death. Emma s love for this place inspires her to open the farm to school-children and families who share her respect for it. As she considers selling the land, Emma is confronted with a difficult question who, through thick and thin, will care for Blue Shadows Farm as her family has done for over a century? In the midst of a controversy that disrupts the entire community, Emma looks into her family s past to help her make crucial decisions about the future of its land. Through the story of the Starkweather family s changing fortunes, and each generation s very different relationship with the farm and the land, Blue Shadows Farm is in some ways the narrative of all farmers and the increasingly difficult challenges they face as committed stewards of the land.Finalist, General Fiction, Midwest Book Awards"