Asperity Street Poems

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Asperity Street - Poems

Author : Gail White
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409551
Total Pages : 98 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Asperity Street - Poems by : Gail White

Download or read book Asperity Street - Poems written by Gail White and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-08-31 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asperity Street, Gail White’s most balanced poetry collection, explores the breadth of human existence with cutting wit, irreverence, keen intelligence, and an uncommon mix of empathy and asperity. Besides the cynical or the lighthearted, which are hallmarks of White’s work, there is a newfound earnestness and gravity in these poems in their survey and interrogation of the human condition. White journeys the span from nursery to hospice—in between, she navigates the prom, family occasions, mating, gossip, and money matters with masterful formal dexterity. This is a collection that rewards the reader with a thoroughly entertaining and illuminating experience. PRAISE FOR ASPERITY STREET: In her remarkable collection, Asperity Street, Gail White takes on the whole sweep of existence. The street becomes the road of a lifetime, beginning with a Southern childhood and ending with a hospice finale. Laconic, ironic and comic, White’s drily resourceful, wickedly companionable voice takes aim on patrimony, matrimony, religion, money and the myth that assumes we choose our lives. With her sublime linguistic choreography, these poems dance to complex metrical tunes. We feel and hear them pulse with equal parts sympathy and vitriol. In Gail White’s capable hands, Asperity Street unfolds as a brilliant mural we can return to again and again, as the poet does—still vulnerable, and wiser each time. — Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Gail White has done it again: here is another collection by one of America’s wittiest, most technically adept, funniest and most serious commentators on what it feels like to be human. — Rhina P. Espaillat (from the foreword), author of Her Place in These Designs I looked forward to reading Gail White’s new book of poems, Asperity Street, because I know she is one of America’s funniest poets, so when I got the manuscript I sat down to read it immediately. I knew how much I would enjoy it. I was not disappointed. The first three sections of this four-part collection have wit and bon mots in good measure, socko endings, words I’d never seen in poems before, like “cloaca” or a made-up word ending, “substituth,” to satisfy a droll rhyme. But nothing prepared me for part four. Nothing procedural changed. The insights were as sharp as ever, the language exact and clear, the cleverness and dexterity with form as deft, the music as mesmerizing . . . but this was a serious poet I’d not encountered before: there was a deepening of vision, an enhancement of feeling, the rueful treatment of life and death took on a cutting edge that slices to the bone. Don’t miss reading this book. — Lewis Turco, author of The Book of Forms

Street View

Author : Maryann Corbett
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409918
Total Pages : 102 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Street View by : Maryann Corbett

Download or read book Street View written by Maryann Corbett and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2017-09-11 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maryann Corbett’s Street View is a panorama of views: suburban and urban avenues, shown in leaf and in snow; alleyways where misfits lurk in darkness, but also where “Adonis, charioteer of municipal waste collection, rides with the morning”; and boulevards of old buildings whose elegance remains undeniable, even when “prinked in the clown suit of commerce.” Street View also navigates the resiliency and failings of the human body, and the memories of family and pivotal acquaintances that shape viewpoints for good or ill. This is the work of a seasoned poet in command of her craft, and deservedly, a finalist for the 2016 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR STREET VIEW: Assaulted, as we all are, by relentless, restless noise-throbbing subwoofers, urban construction, cynical marketing and violent news, even our own banal chitchat-Maryann Corbett “strafe[s] back with the whole Roget/ and gun[s her] engine to its own rough strife. . . .” Though her weapons, her engines, are stillness, insight, and rhythm, there is indeed a sense in which the poems in Street View wallop their subjects with language. The exquisite, seemingly effortless grace of these poems with their penetrating music and humor deserve a commendation like that the poet gives Veronese: “This is the catechesis/ we need now, for the kind of sight we work with/ here, where the world kabooms.” -George David Clark Given her gift with detail, Maryann Corbett is the perfect person to offer a view, but an even more perfect person to offer a “street view,” the title of her new collection. While Corbett has made a career of being precise, she can be whimsical as well, right down to the “Northrop Mall . . . as fixed and formal as an English sonnet.” Yet perhaps her greatest strength is that she is not afraid to be the quiet steady gaze that takes in everything: all the things most people would miss. -Kim Bridgford Maryann Corbett takes the ode less traveled (not to mention the terzanelle less tried and the dactylic hexameter almost unheard of) to oddly familiar destinations: the West Side Y in New York City, Grand Avenue in St. Paul, the dentist’s clinic. She is a rhapsodist of times past and places lost or endangered, but she also lives very much in the present. She examines experiences with shrewdness and fascination, crafting them into poems that are breathtaking in their intelligence and brio. -Susan McLean In Maryann Corbett’s new book, we are given a Street View on the world, from Minneapolis to Jerusalem. These streets are populated with a variety of town characters, from the vagrant to the dangerous academic “Weirdo” with his void-sucked soul who makes one think of mass killings. Suffice it to say that the street view might be uglier than the view onto the mountains or the ocean, but in that ugliness can be found a clearer view on the truth of how we live today. -Tony Barnstone

Asperity Street

Author : Gail White
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781927409541
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (95 download)

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Book Synopsis Asperity Street by : Gail White

Download or read book Asperity Street written by Gail White and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asperity Street, Gail White's most balanced poetry collection, explores the breadth of human existence with cutting wit, irreverence, keen intelligence, and an uncommon mix of empathy and asperity. Besides the cynical or the lighthearted, which are hallmarks of White's work, there is a newfound earnestness and gravity in these poems in their survey and interrogation of the human condition. White journeys the span from nursery to hospice--in between, she navigates the prom, family occasions, mating, gossip, and money matters with masterful formal dexterity. This is a collection that rewards the reader with a thoroughly entertaining and illuminating experience. PRAISE FOR "ASPERITY STREET: " In her remarkable collection, Asperity Street, Gail White takes on the whole sweep of existence. The street becomes the road of a lifetime, beginning with a Southern childhood and ending with a hospice finale. Laconic, ironic and comic, White s drily resourceful, wickedly companionable voice takes aim on patrimony, matrimony, religion, money and the myth that assumes we choose our lives. With her sublime linguistic choreography, these poems dance to complex metrical tunes. We feel and hear them pulse with equal parts sympathy and vitriol. In Gail White s capable hands, Asperity Street unfolds as a brilliant mural we can return to again and again, as the poet does still vulnerable, and wiser each time. Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Gail White has done it again: here is another collection by one of America s wittiest, most technically adept, funniest and most serious commentators on what it feels like to be human. Rhina P. Espaillat (from the foreword), author of Her Place in These Designs I looked forward to reading Gail White s new book of poems, Asperity Street, because I know she is one of America s funniest poets, so when I got the manuscript I sat down to read it immediately. I knew how much I would enjoy it. I was not disappointed. The first three sections of this four-part collection have wit and bon mots in good measure, socko endings, words I d never seen in poems before, like cloaca or a made-up word ending, substituth, to satisfy a droll rhyme. But nothing prepared me for part four. Nothing procedural changed. The insights were as sharp as ever, the language exact and clear, the cleverness and dexterity with form as deft, the music as mesmerizing . . . but this was a serious poet I d not encountered before: there was a deepening of vision, an enhancement of feeling, the rueful treatment of life and death took on a cutting edge that slices to the bone. Don t miss reading this book. Lewis Turco, author of The Book of Forms ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Gail White has published three previous books of poetry (The Price of Everything, Easy Marks and The Accidental Cynic) and several chapbooks, the latest being Sonnets in a Hostile World. She has edited three anthologies, including coediting The Muse Strikes Back. Gail is widely published and her poetry has appeared in such journals as Measure, Raintown Review, First Things, and Mezzo Cammin, and in anthologies such as Villanelles and Killer Verse, both from Pocket Poets. Gail received the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for 2012 and 2013. She lives with her husband and three cats in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Asperity Steet is a special honoree in the 2014 Able Muse Book Award."

Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Author : Aaron Poochigian
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409934
Total Pages : 90 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) by : Aaron Poochigian

Download or read book Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) written by Aaron Poochigian and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aaron Poochigian’s prizewinning second collection of poetry, Manhattanite, is by turns frenzied and focused. It examines New York’s juxtaposed symbols of towering achievement and monumental desolation, and then traverses the country to California’s Central Valley, where the poet reclaims his grandparents’ home. Poochigian consistently entertains, whether his theme is lamentation or celebration—a grizzled urban pigeon (scavenging for “the sort of faith/ that holds for here and now and vibes like song”) or an Ohio wind turbine (an “ungatherable/ iron flower” seen “juggling . . . / three arms’ worth/ of gale-force wind”). Manhattanite is, deservedly, the winner of the 2016 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR MANHATTANITE: In Manhattanite, Aaron Poochigian takes on the role of American flâneur for the twenty-first century, drifting through the frenetic metropolis at a dreamer’s planetary pace. This collection is a celebration of exuberant melancholy, or melancholy exuberance, slick lyric cum urbane pastoral. —A. E. Stallings (from the foreword), 2016 Able Muse Book Award judge Manhattanite gives us the Manhattan of speed chess players in the park, tipsy tipplers tipping off the rooftops, the night sky bright with city light, tenants, tenements and supers. Aaron Poochigian is the poet in New York seeking a holy aura in the song of gunshots and spiral sirens, picking like a grizzled pigeon through stray newspapers, bottles, bags, and candy wrappers for a scrap of religion. Each poem is a tower growing out of our human filth and scraping the sky with sky-lines, and together they build a city of words. Put New York in your pocket. It’s inside this book. —Tony Barnstone Reading Aaron Poochigian’s Manhattanite is a dynamic, kinetic experience. These poems travel at a fast clip, pulling you along through cityscapes, wastelands, and other vistas. Some of the poems tunnel downward, plumbing depths of mood and memory. Whichever way they move, Poochigian’s poems perform with such panache and brio that it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. I’d say do both—and keep reading. But be warned: this isn’t a feel-good book. It’s a fearless book. —Rachel Hadas Thoreau once boasted that he had traveled widely in Concord; Aaron Poochigian’s title indicates that he has traveled widely elsewhere—in the one borough worth experiencing, through western deserts, aboard “an ultra-modern train/ lisping through French or German woods,” and in a Paris of naked bulbs and seedy cabarets. In all of these settings, he deftly choreographs his cast of nameless characters. The concluding lines of “Song: Go and Do It” claim, “I’ll still swear/ we could be happy anywhere.” One sure location of that “anywhere” exists between the covers of Manhattanite. —R. S. Gwynn

The Blind Loon - A Bestiary

Author : Ed Shacklee
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409861
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis The Blind Loon - A Bestiary by : Ed Shacklee

Download or read book The Blind Loon - A Bestiary written by Ed Shacklee and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his impressive bestiary, The Blind Loon, Ed Shacklee shows as keen an insight into the nature of the beast roaming free as into the beast within. This encyclopedic collection includes the commonplace python, monkey, crocodile, tortoise, camel; the mythical kraken, lamia, chimera, wyvern; the prehistoric ankylosaurus; the fantastical logorrhea, mope, snub, hipster. Shacklee doles out marvels, mischief and hilarity in The Blind Loon, and the breathtaking illustrations of Russ Spitkovsky provide an accompanying visual feast that are by themselves worth the price of admission. A Fog of Blurbs Their plumage is a sheen of words whose meanings are the same- inveigling, too often heard, obnoxious birds, but tame, their mewling call is pecks of praise without one speck of blame. Indifferent if they foul their nests or poop rains on the rabble, garrulously gathered on the garret eaves of Babel, they preen as they pontificate on arts in which they dabble, for truth goes out the window when the Blurbs fly into town; a mist of cloying tidings, thought essential to renown, their beaks grow long and longer and are uniformly brown.

Animal Psalms - Poems

Author : Alfred Nicol
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409705
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Animal Psalms - Poems by : Alfred Nicol

Download or read book Animal Psalms - Poems written by Alfred Nicol and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alfred Nicol’s Animal Psalms begins with the baseball field’s organized uncertainties, and continues on many a trajectory of animal ruminations—with the human species well accounted for—ending in the imbalance of the everyday “Nuts” around us. The subjects include the elephant, snake, sheep, skunk, bee, couple dynamics, the trials and triumphs of the ruler or the everyman. This is a collection rich in aphorisms on the bright and shady spectra of our interactions. Recognizable soliloquies with the meditative self or dialogues with the beloved are unraveled for keen insights on the human condition—deconstructing them until the knotty connecting threads are exposed. Nicol gives us a mature collection of quiet reflection, with wit and wisdom deployed through finely crafted poems of masterly formal dexterity. PRAISE FOR ANIMAL PSALMS: Dear reader, I’ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too. Read, for instance, the very last poem, “Nuts,” and read the great “How to Ignore an Invisible Man,” and you’re hooked forever. Read all the rest, these poems by Alfred Nicol which have our numbers, and have his own too, that tell about our lives, and his, and the lives of snakes, and bees, and elephants, with such humor, and pity, and praise, for all of us, human and animal, in our situations. It’s impossible not to fall in love. —David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the National Book Award As the title Animal Psalms suggests, there is reverence here—a reverence that derives less from religion than from a religious attention to the things of the world, from baseball games to zoo elephants to the newly beloved. Nicol is a melodic writer, called first to the music of words, to “speech that lets the sound/ carry the greater part of what is said.” He’s also a poet whose images you won’t soon forget. They summon the real world and simultaneously render it otherworldly. While the poems offer moments of ecstatic escape, they’re more often held in check by an Augustan wit, ironic humor and a touch of Baudelaire. Poise and wit prevail in these psalms; they give us both despair inflected by light and illumination held fast by darkness. —Erica Funkhouser, author of Earthly If we would only take the time to let one of Alfred Nicol’s poems sink in through the brilliant latticed grid of its formal exterior, how the truth of what he has to say about the human condition would hit us the way a line drive whips toward you on a dreamy summer’s afternoon, startling you back into the electric now. I love these poems because they evoke for me the zany, spiritual energy of the Beats welded as only a workman can work unwieldy things to the tempered grid of six centuries of formalism. Don’t be surprised if—after reading these poems—you find them turning back to their true subject, dear reader, which turns out to be none other than you. —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey

Slingshots and Love Plums - Poems

Author : Wendy Videlock
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409535
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Slingshots and Love Plums - Poems by : Wendy Videlock

Download or read book Slingshots and Love Plums - Poems written by Wendy Videlock and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slingshots and Love Plums, Wendy Videlock’s third full-length collection, sometimes evokes the lightheartedness of The Dark Gnu and Other Poems previous to it, sometimes enchants with the frolics and insights of her Nevertheless debut. It especially shines with the brilliance of its wit, its spirituality—as in Videlock’s fiat lux invocation for her “Dear Reader” “resembling the first, or the last word.” Harnessing proverbs, myths, paeans, execrations, riddles, and pithy odes to the natural world and the people around her, Videlock delivers an inspired collection that rollicks, startles and uplifts. PRAISE FOR SLINGSHOTS AND LOVE PLUMS: From its title to its last poem, Wendy Videlock’s Slingshots and Love Plums offers a delicious variety of treats, from witty send-ups of contemporary mores to somber reflections on mortality, love, and friendship. The pleasures include off-kilter rhymes, elegant turns, earthy revelations, and the skillful mockery of pretentiousness in its various forms. —David Caplan, author of In the World He Created According to His Will Videlock arrests because she arrests the complacent drift of sense. She is so good at it that what begins as a taste for her work can quickly turn into a craving—for deliciously cryptic spiritual riddles. —David J. Rothman, author of Part of the Darkness, from the foreword Wendy Videlock’s poems in Slingshots and Love Plums sometimes hint at their Colorado origins but are never pinned down by a locality or a life story. They are gleefully universal, taking delight equally in huge abstraction and intimate real-worldliness. Whether enchanting, imploring, or arguing, they always fascinate, concentrating their acrobatics of thought and sound on the knots of the human experience. —Maryann Corbett, author of Mid Evil Wendy Videlock is one of the few poets I can still read at length and purely for pleasure. Playfully wise, sharp-tongued, and surprising as ever, Slingshots and Love Plums is yet another treasure to be read and reread at your leisure. Thereafter you’ll find all your thinking is rhymed—but, don’t mind: it’s just dust from the master. —Timothy Green, editor of Rattle

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Author : Emily Leithauser
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409683
Total Pages : 84 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) by : Emily Leithauser

Download or read book The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) written by Emily Leithauser and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-07-04 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser transforms keenly felt experience and bittersweet memories into poems of impressive craftsmanship. She deftly muses on the dichotomies of, among other things, childhood and growing up, the headiness of love gained and the pangs of love lost, the joys of the nuclear family and the trials when it gets broken up. Although a first book, The Borrowed World is the seasoned work of poet of abundant talent coming into her powers and deservedly, the winner of the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR THE BORROWED WORLD: In The Borrowed World, Emily Leithauser’s formal mastery—her consummate knack for writing lines and sentences as crisp and elegant as the Edo prints to which she pays homage—entwines with the sheer immediacy and vulnerability of the poet’s voice. Leithauser portrays the inevitability of loss, in romantic and familial relationships, and yet, without ever offering false resolutions or pat conclusions, she manages to make her poems themselves convincing stays against loss. I mean that this book is made to endure. The Borrowed World marks the arrival of a major talent. —Peter Campion, 2015 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of El Dorado Emily Leithauser’s first collection, The Borrowed World, is an elegant meditation on inheritance, the vagaries of love and loss, familial relations—with all the devastating implosions within—and our relationship to the past filtered through the flawed lens of memory. These are deeply felt poems and Leithauser has a finely-tuned ear for the lyricism of syntax and the enduring rhythms of traditional forms. The Borrowed World is her stunning debut. —Natasha Trethewey, 2012–2014 US Poet Laureate, author of Thrall If her intensely accurate perceptions of the physical world and the beautiful forms in which she sets those perceptions were all that Emily Leithauser gave us in these poems, they would be more than enough to satisfy the hungriest poetry reader. But step by perspicuous step, in poem after poem, she enlarges and encompasses, she broadens and deepens and transmutes perception into feeling, feeling into thought, and thought into revelation. —Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of 3 Sections Love poems, family poems, narrative poems: The Borrowed World is a moving and memorable debut which covers a lot of ground but is always rooted in actualities. The poems are very well-made, too, but their equally great distinction is to be well-felt—subtle in their account of the observing “I,” and simultaneously generous and shrewd in their understanding of others. Page by page, they create a series of powerful cameos; taken as a whole, their larger purpose emerges: to register what can be known and (especially) not known about our lives as individuals, and to value what time allows us to enjoy on earth, while admitting the brevity of our stay here. —Andrew Motion, 1999–2009 UK Poet Laureate, author of The Customs House I have read The Borrowed World several times, and each time I find more in it to be delighted and touched by. Emily Leithauser’s art waits for you, and I am sure that you will be as pleased and moved by it as I have been. —Michael Palma (from the foreword), author of Begin in Gladness

Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

Author : Carrie Shipers
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409608
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) by : Carrie Shipers

Download or read book Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry) written by Carrie Shipers and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carrie Shipers’s Cause for Concern traverses a landscape of assorted disasters—such as overwork and layoffs, the ill-fated explorer, circus mishaps, nuclear disaster and radiation—but at its heart is the personal disaster of spousal illness. While a spouse might avow faith in the sentiment of love in sickness and in health, the practice of such faith might come undone when faced with the reality of the ravages of illness on the stricken body of the beloved, alongside the caregiving mate who “could love/ [her] husband but distrust his body,/ expect betrayal at every turn.” Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish and, deservedly, the winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award for Poetry. PRAISE FOR CAUSE FOR CONCERN: Carrie Shipers’s magnificent endeavor aims to control the uncontrollable. In her splendid collection Cause for Concern she gives us her spirited poems—subversively satisfying in our era of cool wordplay. Both her comfort with ambiguity and her sassy candor aid the poet as she writes of a wife who is hoodwinked into a necessary patience—one she both chafes from and rebels against after her husband falls seriously ill. In rhythms that alternate between hope and defeat, the poems track the illness, but also punctuate the couple’s changed world with quirky observations and a scrappy spirituality. (Not to mention a canine companion.) Her poet’s craft, palpable in every arresting line, makes the subtlest turns of vulnerability with enviable poise. —Molly Peacock, 2014 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Paper Garden Only a poet of unquestionable bravery and technical acuity could rehearse the quotidian details of a middle class, middle aged existence with such exquisite, irresistible and terrifying honesty. —Kwame Dawes, author of Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems If illness is a country inhospitable to guests, then Carrie Shipers’s second poetry collection, Cause for Concern, is our guidebook, preparing us for what we will find in the waiting room, by the bedside, in the bathroom, or on the skin when the gauze is lifted. These are naked, open poems. They say things that make us wince, as when we look at an incision still puckered and red. Shipers reminds us that our lives must first be prodded and cauterized, if the injured parts are ever to heal. —Jehanne Dubrow, author of The Arranged Marriage

Second Rain

Author : Elise Hempel
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409748
Total Pages : 76 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Second Rain by : Elise Hempel

Download or read book Second Rain written by Elise Hempel and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-08-29 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Second Rain, Elise Hempel gleans anecdotes of uncommon poignancy from the seemingly commonplace, and crafts them into memorable poems. Family settings and the world of nature are captured and shaped into insight through the poet’s discerning eyes: here an only child in her room with a lone and captive katydid; here a feisty grandmother in the hospital; here a father fond of household projects, building two swimming pools, a basketball hoop in the driveway, and transforming the yard into a skating rink. This inspirational debut collection, charged with nostalgia and longing, is fittingly finalist in the 2015 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR SECOND RAIN: The apparently domestic poems in Second Rain (poems about family, gardening, dogs, birds, and a few memorable tigers) deliver enough controlled intensity “to shake the trees all down.” A special gift of Elise Hempel’s art is to evoke and suggest passions without spelling them out; we readers get to unscramble the anagram, to find the ache—and our own corresponding ache—beneath the poised surface. —Rachel Hadas, author of Questions in the Vestibule [Elise Hempel’s] curiosity and insights singled her out as special, but her ability to shape her feelings into words remains what I find most unique . . . From the opening title poem on, this is a book about the often ignored, simple gifts that come to us, like “the second rain that comes/ when the first is over,” that “gentle scattering of drops” the breeze shakes down from the trees and “briefly blesses you.” —Bruce Guernsey (from the foreword), author of From Rain: Poems, 1970–2010 From the title poem on, Elise Hempel’s Second Rain matches form with feeling, delivering insights that seem at once inevitable and necessary. Her sense of the sonnet—its grace and shape—lends quiet force to what’s remembered and observed, from a pet shop crow to memories of now-absent loved ones, mother-daughter conflicts to the ambiguities of language itself. Like the flock of geese described in one poem here, Hempel’s collection succeeds in many “different keys.” —James Scruton, author of Thrift Through admirably controlled and marvelously controlling language, the compressed imagery in Elise Hempel’s powerfully compact poems subtly evokes emotional responses, while the poet also smartly engages readers with an authentic and persuasive voice. Indeed, to borrow a phrase from the eighth and final line in the collection’s title poem, each piece in Second Rain “briefly blesses you.” —Edward Byrne, author of Seeded Light

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Author : John Ridland
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409772
Total Pages : 124 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by : John Ridland

Download or read book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written by John Ridland and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-08-22 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the anonymous Gawain-Poet (or Pearl-Poet) is, like Beowulf, one of the greatest classics of English literature. Hailed as the finest Arthurian romance, this technically brilliant tale of enchantment, faith, temptation, and chivalry is tautly constructed, with a wonderfully rich vocabulary and vivid language that blends sophisticated atmosphere with psychological depth. John Ridland’s new Modern English translation, unlike most presentations, is complete, covering every passage and word of the Middle English, Northwest Midland dialect original with the same line numbering, contents and meaning. His is the only version written in a familiar modern meter—pleasurable to modern ears, yet retaining the spirit of repetition and alliteration of the medieval original. And Dr. Ridland’s introduction and notes are enlightening. This translation is a must-have for unlocking all the pleasures and delights of the original classic. PRAISE FOR JOHN RIDLAND’S TRANSLATION: With his loving rendition of a great classic into vigorous metrical lines, John Ridland has given Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a fresh lease on life. I’ve seen several other versions of this masterpiece, but none so engagingly readable as Ridland’s. His preface, too, is useful and illuminating. Here is a book to enjoy right now and to cherish forever. —X.J. Kennedy John Ridland gives us a recognizably English Gawain, and a very pleasurable one at that. The language is ours. It is slightly elevated, as befits a work so finely crafted, but only enough to demand our attention. Originally written in the same alliterative verse as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was archaic in its own day; now, over six-hundred years later, alliterative verse can be as inaccessible as the pentatonic harp tunes that apparently accompanied it. Ridland gives the poem a long, loose line that sings in the lyrical passages, creeps in the spooky ones, and cavorts in the comic ones. Just as important, the densely mythic ethos, fully intact, enriches every word. —Richard Wakefield Panoramas of banqueting and hunting, closely observed rituals of dressing, arming, and game preparation, and rich descriptions of landscape and weather—Ridland’s translation presents these in all their delightful, over-the-top particularity. —Maryann Corbett (from the foreword) The language in which the consummate poet and translator John Ridland serves up this delicious story in verse is exactly what it deserves. The descriptions are exuberant, the narrative flows and exhilarates like the wine at the courts we’re asked to imagine, and the exchanges between complex characters so subtly flavored by intelligent diplomacy that it makes the dialogue of much current fiction seem, by contrast, like a six-pack on the front stoop. Read this book. I suspect that, like all enchantments, it shifts and assumes different forms to different eyes. But I do guarantee surprises, and inexhaustible delight. —Rhina P. Espaillat

Figuring in the Figure

Author : Ben Berman
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409721
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Figuring in the Figure by : Ben Berman

Download or read book Figuring in the Figure written by Ben Berman and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ben Berman’s second full-length collection, Figuring in the Figure, poems laden with aphorisms, puns, and witticisms meditate on shapes, angles, thinking about thinking, marriage, and the joys and trials of bringing a daughter into the world, among others. Sometimes with a Frostian spirit, sometimes with a touch of Zen, the known is questioned and wisdom gleaned from daily experience. This is a book that challenges us to reimagine the familiar, both physical and spiritual, while reminding us not to “wander through this world without wonder.” PRAISE FOR FIGURING IN THE FIGURE: “Because design, alone, doesn’t hold weight,/” Ben Berman writes in his remarkable second collection of poems, “we need concrete material—the image/ of a bridge over the sound of water.” In Figuring in the Figure, Berman explores the nature of form in its deepest most complex sense. His luminous details evoke a world of mutable forms and shapes that suggest the fragility of our lives. The book culminates with a moving, realistic yet lyrical sequence of poems about the birth of his daughter. This is a quietly beautiful book that deserves attention and recognition. —Jeff Friedman, author of Pretenders Figuring in the Figure is a self-portrait of a man becoming a father. Ben Berman writes inside a modified terza rima that makes a virtue out of clarity and discernment. The influence here of Frost returns us to Frost’s virtues: these poems make points and have a point of view. Like Frost, Berman is unsparing in his introspection. He offers us an ongoing philosophy: when faced with the pain and contradiction of everyday life, “to delay judgment and contemplate . . . incompatible thoughts.” —Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus Ben Berman’s nimble terza rima is the perfect vehicle for the poems of Figuring in the Figure. Both expansive and structured, the interwoven stanzas allow him to form and reform probing questions of identity without ever forsaking a deep musicality. We watch the speaker ponder mouse droppings, hit the wall in a marathon, describe the great molasses flood of 1919, diaper a doll in a birthing class, then try to manage his “tiny fascist” of a toddler who wouldn’t stop until “every bookshelf toppled/ like a/ failed coup.” His observations are enriched with various kinds of humor—aphorisms, riddles, word plays, and puns. This book is wise and wonderful. —Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, author of Unmentionables Ben Berman’s fine, clever poems are never merely clever. Their frisky formal play is finally and importantly about the finding of forms that might adequately contain our feelings. As his title, Figuring in the Figure, suggests, Berman is fond of double meanings; indeed, he is in love with all the twists and turns of language, as well as all the structures that display the pleasures of thinking. If invention is his inclination, order is his learned yet sly companion, “a partner,” he writes, “the type/ that coyly invites chaos to dance.” —Lawrence Raab, author of Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts

Able Muse, Winter 2015 (No. 20 - print edition)

Author : Alexander Pepple
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409640
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse, Winter 2015 (No. 20 - print edition) by : Alexander Pepple

Download or read book Able Muse, Winter 2015 (No. 20 - print edition) written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2015 issue, Number 20. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse—online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." – Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2015 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION — Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL — Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST — Léon Leijdekkers. FEATURED POET — Amit Majmudar; (Interviewed by Daniel Brown). FICTION — Paul Soto, Lynda Sexson, Andrea Witzke Slot. ESSAYS — N.S. Thompson, Moira Egan. BOOK REVIEWS — Stephen Kampa, Robert B. Shaw. POETRY — X.J. Kennedy, Wendy Videlock, Kim Bridgford, Peter Kline, Catharine Savage Brosman, Terese Coe, Steven Winn, Jay Udall, Beth Houston, Jennifer Reeser, Leslie Schultz, Ryan Wilson, Max Gutmann, Freeman Rogers, Dan Campion, Brooke Clark, David Stephenson, Autumn Newman, James Matthew Wilson, Athar C. Pavis, Jeanne Wagner, Elise Hempel.

Times Square and Other Stories

Author : William Baer
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409446
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Times Square and Other Stories by : William Baer

Download or read book Times Square and Other Stories written by William Baer and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In William Baer’s Times Square and Other Stories, there are everyday characters walking extraordinary paths for love; there are smart, skillful characters struggling to reconcile their viewpoints and convictions with the status quo in fields such as art, education, the cinema and religious doctrine. There is baseball and the story of the skills, training and ethics of pitching in the big leagues. And there is war and an enemy invasion juxtaposed with a do-or-die chess game. The stories take us coast to coast from New York to LA, away to South America, and overseas to Eastern and Western Europe. This is a fun-filled, fact-filled collection that smoothly melds scholarship with the everyday for unique, fresh, and highly intelligent stories, which are also highly entertaining. PRAISE FOR TIMES SQUARE AND OTHER STORIES: How wonderful to come across such a serious collection of short stories! Not “serious” as in boring and tendentious; but serious as in grown-up, broadminded, large-hearted, sharply observed, and dryly, obliquely funny. Bill Baer’s fiction kicks ass. — Pinckney Benedict, author of Town Smoke As elegantly written as they are inventive, the short stories in Times Square and Other Stories engage the reader all the way from the title piece, an ambitious tale that draws upon art, love, and the complex beauty of the human narrative, through eight other works that touch upon the timeless questions of what it means to create and to act, to be and to pretend. Baer’s collection achieves that Horatian goal so sorely lacking in much of contemporary fiction—informing while delighting at the same time. The obligation to craft is taken very seriously in these pages, but the effort that undoubtedly went into their composition could easily be overlooked due to the skill with which they are rendered, and the degree to which they are enjoyed. — A.G. Harmon, author of A House All Stilled Times Square and Other Stories, William Baer’s twice-measured fictions, channel the reflecting reflections of James and Borges back into our self-conscious consciousness. Like the four-story signs plastering the “real” Times Square, these signs sing themselves, maps as detailed as the things they represent. These fictions resuscitate Poe’s unities of effects, breathing life back into the simulacrum of life. I loved this book; it can’t help but blurb itself! — Michael Martone, author of Four for a Quarter

Able Muse, Winter 2016 (No. 22 - print edition)

Author : Alexander Pepple
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409810
Total Pages : 172 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse, Winter 2016 (No. 22 - print edition) by : Alexander Pepple

Download or read book Able Muse, Winter 2016 (No. 22 - print edition) written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-12-04 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2016 issue, Number 22. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Museprint edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2016 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Mitch Dobrowner; (Interviewed by Sharon Passmore). FEATURED POET - Bill Coyle; (Interviewed by Ernest Hilbert). FICTION - Erika Warmbrunn, Cameron MacKenzie, Vicky Mlyniec. ESSAYS - Gerry Cambridge. BOOK REVIEWS - Amit Majmudar, Brooke Clark. POETRY - Amit Majmudar, Len Krisak, Scott Ruescher, Timothy Murphy, Cody Walker, Christine de Pizan, Håkan Sandell, Anna M. Evans, Feng Zhi, Tony Barnstone, Liz Ahl, Susan McLean, Elise Hempel, Siham Karami, Maryann Corbett, Fran Markover, Colleen Carias, Julie Steiner, Elizabeth Wager, Clare Jones.

Able Muse, Summer 2016 (No. 21 - print edition)

Author : Amanda Jernigan
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409799
Total Pages : 164 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse, Summer 2016 (No. 21 - print edition) by : Amanda Jernigan

Download or read book Able Muse, Summer 2016 (No. 21 - print edition) written by Amanda Jernigan and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2016 issue, Number 21. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Andy Biggs. FEATURED POET - Amanda Jernigan; (Interviewed by Ange Mlinko). FICTION - Andrew Valentine, Terri Brown-Davidson, John Christopher Nelson, Timothy Reilly. ESSAYS - Ron McFarland, N.S. Thompson, Barbara Haas. BOOK REVIEWS - Amit Majmudar, John Ellis. POETRY - Midge Goldberg, Jean L. Kreiling, Sankha Ghosh, Timothy Murphy, Pedro Poitevin, Joseph Hutchison, Pierre de Ronsard, Heinrich Heine, Catharine Savage Brosman, Rachel Hadas, Stephen Palos, Bruce Bennett, Doris Watts, Jeanne Emmons.

How to Cut a Woman in Half

Author : Janis Harrington
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490958
Total Pages : 96 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Cut a Woman in Half by : Janis Harrington

Download or read book How to Cut a Woman in Half written by Janis Harrington and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2022-11-25 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a testament to resiliency in the throes of mounting family tragedies and trials “beyond human comprehension.” This odyssey from loss toward recovery and hope celebrates the boundless love and support between siblings. Using an adapted sonnet form, Harrington has wrought a taut and spellbinding tale in this finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR HOW TO CUT A WOMAN IN HALF: In this stunning sequence of sonnets—a sequence that reads like a novel, in which each sonnet is so masterfully crafted that its form disappears into the story it tells—Janis Harrington spins a larger narrative of intergenerational family tragedy, but also of sisterly devotion and resilience. The whole sweep of it is so compelling that once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. How to Cut a Woman in Half takes the reader through shock and grief and then, very subtly and tenderly, back from the edge of an abyss. —Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem and Earth These deft narrative sonnets beautifully contain painful restraint and the breaking of sorrow; the slant and partial rhymes refuse to meet expectations for grieving an intentional death: “We look at each other, still / as the motionless hands on the clock’s face, / marooned in this spotless, silent house, / nothing on the horizon to save us.” The sisters save each other, learning to appreciate “the ordinary miracle of dawn.” —April Ossmann, author of Anxious Music and Event Boundaries These carefully wrought sonnets take readers on a journey “to grief’s center” as the speaker supports her sister through new widowhood and, in the process, rediscovers and explores her own submerged grief. Many poems take place in the liminal space between “living and not,” bardo moments that contain “all my life’s partings.” It is striking how fully present the speaker is in the experience of mourning, and how well suited the sonnet form is for containing such deeply personal wells of human sorrow. A beautiful and healing read. —Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive and Only ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including: Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, North Carolina Literary Review, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. She was the runner-up for the White Pine Press Poetry Prize 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 James Applewhite Poetry Prize and the 2022 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. After living in Switzerland for many years, she and her husband returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. How to Cut a Woman in Half was a finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award.