In the literary economy, poetry is an art more in supply than demand. Nearly everybody writes poetry, or so it seems. But who reads it?     Little kids love its melody and meaning, but by high school it’s force-fed. Most of the rest of us take it, often in the form of Hallmark verse, to help us express emotions for which we seem to have no words of our own.     It takes a clever poet to sneak in under our defenses.

If anyone should write a book about being a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay, it should be Capt. Larry Simns, who has worked the water for seven decades and has served as president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association for 40 years. His efforts on behalf of commercial watermen, Chesapeake Bay and the seafood industry are all but ­legendary.

Denise Blum’s Chesapeake Bay Crab Challenge is about Jay, a young boy who wakes up one morning to find his pet crab Clay missing from his aquarium. Where could Clay be? Will Jay find him?     Blum takes readers on a hunt through Chesapeake Country’s Lusby, Oxford and Cambridge — to stores, restaurants and parks.     Children will recognize some of the local landmarks; the story begs a field trip to the unfamiliar places. (I wanted to climb into my car and take off for Rock Hall and Chestertown.)

Midnight in Moscow opens with a scene with immediate familiarity for local readers: a news story featuring a car set ablaze at a BWI parking lot. Then a young Russian American woman is found murdered along the C&O Canal. From there it’s a short hop to Annapolis and the main character, Emily Cowan, a sassy sleuth of a certain age who globetrots from western Maryland to Germany, Russia and the Near East.

Autumn is forecast spectacular for the Thanksgiving weekend, opening one of the year’s last doors to get out into Chesapeake Country. One way to accept the invitation is to follow the December issue of SeaKayaker onto the treasure in our own backyard, the Patuxent Water Trail.

The best appetizer is a good story. With that philosophy of life, I’m drooling over Bernard L. Herman’s first-person story of his ­Chesapeake Thanksgiving feast in this month’s Saveur.     A titled professor of American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Herman tells his story with the loving detail we tend to reserve for faraway times.

Writers and poets of the greater Bay Weekly area, here is your chance to see your best work as a book.     Storm Sandy pushed the venerable Washington Writers’ Publishing House annual deadline to December 1. Fiction writers and poets living within a 75-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol — in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia — thus gain an extra month to prepare manuscripts for entry in two annual book competitions.

Can’t stand to wait another week to know who’s going to be president?     Ask Allan Lichtman.     “My 13 questions will tell you who will claim the popular vote,” says the American University political professor, a Marylander who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006.     His keys have called it right in every election since the middle of the 19th century, when the popular vote was first counted.

The Voter’s Guide is a superb primer to the Maryland and Anne Arundel County ballot questions on which we will vote November 6.

Haunted Annapolis: Ghosts of the Capital City reviewed by Sandra Olivetti Martin We are not alone. Other feet have stood in the spot our lively toes now wiggle. Other lives have occupied the place we now call home. Historians may strain an ear to hear reverberations of their passing; most of us are deaf. Until Halloween, when their calls stir the air around us, raising our hackles.