Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter: Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409152
Total Pages : 102 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter: Poems by : Maryann Corbett

Download or read book Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter: Poems written by Maryann Corbett and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maryann Corbett’s second full-length collection, Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, draws on profound experience of deep winter in the lived environment, while keeping alive faith that the thaw will come and bring with it the bloom of “uncountable rows of petals.” The themes of this finalist for the 2011 Able Muse Book Award range from the quotidian to the metaphysical. Corbett’s keen eye brings to focus uncommon detail. Her masterful technical repertoire spans received forms, metrical inventiveness, and free verse. This is poetry that amply rewards the reader with its boundless imagination, insight and visionary delight. PRAISE FOR CREDO FOR THE CHECKOUT LINE IN WINTER: The crafted poems in Maryann Corbett’s new book are vibrant. She is a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Each poem surprises. Read her poems and feel the howling snow, the mud, and the jubilance of the first warm fertile spring days. —Willis Barnstone What makes Maryann Corbett such a rare, excellent writer must be her talent for weaving together various artistic impulses, so that her poems often sound both traditional and brand new, both humorous and serious, both worldly-wise and, as John Keats once put it, “capable of being in uncertainties.” [She] remains a poet of the first order, and her poems are cause for gratitude, and deep enjoyment. —Peter Campion (from the foreword) Corbett is as comfortable and affecting within the tight confines of the Old English alliterative meter (“Cold Case”) and the Sapphic stanza (“Paint Store”) as she is with her supple blank verse and terza rima. Yet never does her rigorous craft interfere with the thoughtful, insightful content of these poems. A stunning collection, from one of America’s most gifted contemporary poets. —Marilyn L. Taylor Do not dismiss this collection as “domestic poetry,” “women’s verse.” Though grounded in seasonal rhythms and familiar settings, it is as vigorous, as reflective, as important as any man’s. Sharply visual, skillfully and cleverly crafted, her poems draw out essences, “concentrated” and persisting. “Beauty changes us,/ calling up wonder from our deepest selves/ to its right place.” —Catharine Savage Brosman These masterful poems announce themselves as winter pieces, and indeed they are so full of sleet and snow that readers may wish to dress warmly. But Corbett’s winter, a season when “dull forms come in the mail” and we eat “tasteless, stone-hard, gassed tomatoes,” is always lushly haunted by the other seasons, the way a house in one of her poems is fronted by a “three-season porch.” Corbett is one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry, and this is one of the best new collections I’ve read in years. —Geoffrey Brock

Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art - Winter 2013 (No. 16 - print edition)

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409284
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art - Winter 2013 (No. 16 - print edition) by : Alexander Pepple

Download or read book Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art - Winter 2013 (No. 16 - print edition) written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2013 issue, Number 16. 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 2013 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. With the winner and runner-up sonnets from the 2013 Able Muse / Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-Off. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Peter Svensson. FEATURED POET - Jehanne Dubrow; (Interviewed by Anna M. Evans). FICTION - Cheryl Diane Kidder, Charles Wilkinson, Blaine Vitallo, Donna Laemmlen. ESSAYS - A.E. Stallings, Peter Byrne, Philip Morre, David Mason, Chrissy Mason. BOOK REVIEWS - Rory Waterman, Jane Hammons. POETRY - Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn, Catharine Savage Brosman, John Savoie, D.R. Goodman, Jeanne Wagner, Richard Wakefield, Melissa Balmain, Tara Tatum, Anna M. Evans, Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen Harvey, Elise Hempel, Marly Youmans, Amanda Luecking Frost, Rachael Briggs, Chris Childers, James Matthew Wilson, Alex Greenberg, Catullus, Sappho, Theocritus.

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

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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.

Able Muse, Winter 2019 (No. 27 - print edition)

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490486
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse, Winter 2019 (No. 27 - print edition) by : Alexander Pepple

Download or read book Able Muse, Winter 2019 (No. 27 - print edition) written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2019 issue, Number 27. 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). Includes the tribute to Timothy Murphy special feature and the winning stories and poems from the 2019 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists. ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."-Dana Gioia. "Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life."-NewPages. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2019 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION – Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists EDITORIAL – Alexander Pepple GUEST EDITORIAL – Richard Wakefield FEATURED ART – A Hunt Theme TRIBUTE TO TIMOTHY MURPHY FEATURE: --Tribute GUEST-EDITOR: Richard Wakefield --Tribute Poetry: A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Rhina P. Espaillat, John Ridland, Amit Majmudar, Wendy Videlock, Bruce Bennett, Len Krisak, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Mary Meriam, Andrew Frisardi, Richard Meyer, John Beaton --Tribute Essay: Dana Gioia FICTION – Erin Russell ESSAYS – Edward Lee, Tony Whedon BOOK REVIEWS – Brooke Clark, Travis Biddick POETRY – Hailey Leithauser, John Philip Drury, Len Krisak, James Matthew Wilson, Suzanne Noguere, Alfred Nicol, Katie Hartsock, David MacRae Landon, Amy Bagan, Barry Abrams, Miriam O'Neal, Beth Paulson, Daniel Galef

Animal Psalms - Poems

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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

Vellum - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409365
Total Pages : 106 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Vellum - Poems by : Chelsea Woodard

Download or read book Vellum - Poems written by Chelsea Woodard and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chelsea Woodard’s Vellum, a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, propels the reader along new paths of discovery in the quotidian as in the mythical. Its scope is far-ranging: a flower press received as a gift in childhood, Tarot reading with a favorite aunt, unexpected reflections at a tattoo parlor, reminiscing about an old flame, the discovery of rare volumes at the local library, or auctioning off old toys on eBay. Woodward’s insights and sensibilities in the visual and performing arts are deftly realized in fine or broad strokes-as in “Coppélia,” “The Painter and the Color-blind,” “Degas’s Nudes,” or as in “Still Life,” which muses that “It’s difficult/ to give back life/ to what’s been cut off from the living.” Stories and scenes represented in popular artwork are reimagined in ekphrastics such as "Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting." With excursions into the surreal, myth is made, lived or remade, as in “Philomela,” “Pegasus” and “The Feral Child.” This is an exquisite debut collection that rewards the mind and senses with its formal impetus and deft musicality, its precise and lively language, its emotional compass. PRAISE FOR VELLUM: In her stunning first collection, Vellum, Chelsea Woodard offers us poems whose lucidity of attention grounds an imaginative realism where narrative becomes speculation, witness becomes mystery, and the body a space where desire and dread complicate compassion’s summons to the social order. The honed music here thus reveals a deeper vulnerability. Such is its gift, the way in which poems might be rooted to the difficulty and heartbreak of the physical and yet apart, “their keel and gristle finally set/ into some deathless, disembodied flight.” An astonishing book. -Bruce Bond In addition to her emotional maturity, part of what makes these poems memorable is Woodard's obvious mastery of language, her flawless sentences, the surprising way those sentences function and "mean" within the lines, the lines within the forms. -Claudia Emerson (from the foreword) Not the least of the attractions of this gifted young poet's first book is the exquisite, searing precision of her language-the obsessively exact diction; the tropes that map with such stunning accuracy the emotional contours of her narratives; the gestural, almost tactile quality of her syntax-all of these talents focused sharply on what Howard Nemerov said was the singular, most difficult achievement of poetry: "getting something right in language." I predict for Chelsea Woodard a long and enviable career. -B.H. Fairchild

Asperity Street - Poems

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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

Bad Fame - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409519
Total Pages : 88 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Bad Fame - Poems by : Martin McGovern

Download or read book Bad Fame - Poems written by Martin McGovern and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin McGovern’s Bad Fame muses on the perplexities and certainties of the human condition, often in soaring eulogies and searing elegies: as in “The Circle of Late Afternoon” which asks, “Isn’t there an art to giving myself away slowly like wheat opening to the sun?”; or, “Processionalia,” where “a bee/ abandons the tea roses/ and circle that black blossom of/ the widow’s veiled face as if her tears were/ pollen and the bee could feather/ its legs with grief.” Be it lore set in Colorado, or farther out, the personal and regional tributes unravel the universally familiar and pertinent. McGovern's debut collection is the work of a seasoned master in command of craft and themes. PRAISE FOR BAD FAME: Martin McGovern’s long-awaited, well-constructed first book gives itself away slowly, artfully. It is carefully considered, quietly passionate, and deeply humane. —Edward Hirsch There is an unforsaken paradise in these pages, and a lot of ungodly anxiety. . . . Like Dubliners, Bad Fame darkens, deepens, darkens through its sections, understanding with Joyce the tidal pull of place that will never let us survive if we resist the current . . . the “blue snow,” not of Dublin, but of memory, of Colorado . . . this extraordinarily unique McGovern flair for the Keatonish (Buster) aside mixed with lyrical intellection, these poetic rooms with their many blue lights, direct or indirect, for us to turn on as night comes on. —David Lazar (from the foreword) Here are exacting sentences, any number irregularly hugged into the ferocious clusters which are Mr. McGovern’s poems. My likely favorite, “If the Light Could Kill Us,” does heavy duty as a garden unfurled at dawn, the beloved “still sleeping,/ flame-pink welts our love leaves on your almost/ too delicate skin, brazen in this light.” And then the assault of a very different sentence, “Samuel Johnson is dead. And Mrs. Thrale./ And the kind cherub of a straitjacket/ she kept closeted should reason fail/ him thoroughly, where’s that deck-coat now?” followed by other people’s torments inspected so closely that this morning “violence/ lingers like the last touch of a season.” Hence: “Only as I rise to pull the window’s shade/ do you wake, dusted and dazed, as from a fever.” Strong as they are, the sentences, like the centuries, are treated pitilessly, as you can hear, yet there is what the poet calls “the shimmer of a teen movie” throughout. Resilient art, and no loitering. —Richard Howard

Uncontested Grounds - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409403
Total Pages : 90 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Uncontested Grounds - Poems by : William Conelly

Download or read book Uncontested Grounds - Poems written by William Conelly and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncontested Grounds, William Conelly’s first full-length collection of poetry, is eclectic in people and places, deftly moving from vineyard to beach, to a Hollywood filmmaking set, and even to the cockpit of a jet fighter. This is also a collection of contrasts-the din of war in “The Lead Man” versus the “hot reductive shore” of “R & R,” the tragedy of suicide in “Ernest in Elysium” versus the stir of the unborn “In the Ninth Month.” This collection of masterfully crafted poems of vivid insights, often delivered with minimalist verve and directness, is fittingly a finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR UNCONTESTED GROUNDS: Uncontested Grounds is a splendid, memorable book. The stylistic precision and trim architecture of these poems may remind us of Edgar Bowers and other California formalists. William Conelly, however, has a voice all his own-shrewd, wry, engaging. Even in his more expansive pieces he writes with epigrammatic force. The perceptions fueling his art are equally alert to the world’s kindness and cruelty, and his work is impressive not only for its elegance but for its quality of lived experience-in short, for a kind of wisdom rarely found these days in verse. -Robert B. Shaw This generous collection of the poems of William Conelly is all the more welcome for being long overdue. Here is a poet who finds extraordinary dimensions in ordinary experience, as in “Treasure” and “The Ford Birthday Ode,” two memorable moments of childhood; as in “Aubade,” “The Sailor,” “Memento,” and “In the Ninth Month”-this last from the point of view of a woman about to give birth. Conelly commands both strict form and free verse, and his language is often fresh and unexpected. Uncontested Grounds will stand as a notable book in this or any year. -X.J. Kennedy Midwestern by birth, William Conelly has lived on both US coasts, as well as in England and the Middle East. He is smart and imaginative, and brings a thriving intelligence to life’s experiences. I found the poems in Uncontested Grounds original, diverse, and lucid. Many are poems of place. The first of these features a bankrupt farmer who ponders the “blue, remorseless beauty” that first lured him onto the stricken acreage he must sell. But the places vary, and some exude enchantment. I am taken by the touch of a drowsy wife’s feet in “Aubade,” and the couple along Florida’s “Gulf Coast” pitying “those who’ll wake alone.” Conelly writes so well, in a variety of forms, I initially absorbed his insights heedless of their traditional underpinnings. These poems easily bear rereading then; they compose a fine selection from one of our best writers. -William J. Smith

Manhattanite (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

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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

Slingshots and Love Plums - Poems

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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

Sea Level Rising - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409411
Total Pages : 94 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Sea Level Rising - Poems by : John Philip Drury

Download or read book Sea Level Rising - Poems written by John Philip Drury and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sea Level Rising, John Philip Drury’s fourth collection, revels in water—flowing through rivers, splashing on quays and docked vessels, the wake of speeding boats, the elusive tang of sea salt in the heart of the prairie, even the water of baptism that rebirths the believer. The uplifting lure of water, as with a pair of honeymooners in Venice, may inspire a love “eager to divorce/ anything impeding its energy.” Our state of being might mirror water’s when “everything’s in flux, repeated spasms/ of wake and wave, bright sun, reflecting pool,/ surges made up of intricate detail.” The waves of music, like those of water, are also prominent in the musings of this collection, where that which “rises and returns/ approaches music, a blessing/ beyond sound.” These are masterfully crafted poems of uncommon inspiration, and they whelm with a celebration and longing for that which ebbs or flows inside us. PRAISE FOR SEA LEVEL RISING: Sea Level Rising is about a lot of things, all in some way the same mystery—why we love tidal waters, why we feel a kinship with the pulse and ebb of time and emptiness, why we feel most alive when we stand at the fractal edges of perception, why the singing of a good poem evokes all those correspondences we can’t help loving. John Philip Drury’s new poems will please many and please often as he celebrates, and with mastery, the inexhaustible waters before and within each of us. —Dave Smith, author of Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005-2010 With candor and a close eye, Drury introduces us to a world of love and literature, nostalgia and new experiences—a world where water pervades everything: a constant and comforting reminder that what we depend on is, like us, also always in flux. Drury is deft at numerous forms, with a delicate touch. You can become so swept up in a poem you may not recognize it as a sonnet until you reach its resounding couplet; but, the beauty of the form—the force of its rhymes and the rapture of their song—has resonated since the opening lines and in all the energy that follows. That’s the wonder of this collection: the “film of beauty, tides that keep on rising,” as Drury writes. Sea Level Rising is an amazing achievement. It should not be missed. —Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades Hurt John Philip Drury is a Marylander; it makes all the difference. The ever-changing sea defines these poems; Drury explores impermanence—destiny, the future, love, fame, desire—anchored by a rock-solid formal mastery. Land and sea interpenetrate here—loom up, fall away—transmuting one into the other, a way of seeing. His favorite city is Venice, a perfect metaphor for a sensibility too large to be only one thing or its opposite. The masks and play of that ancient meeting place of land, sky and sea divert us from the serious business of its survival—and that might be a good way to describe Drury’s art. In impermanence, through our art, we survive. —James Cummins, author of Still Some Cake

Greed: A Confession - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409373
Total Pages : 114 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Greed: A Confession - Poems by : D.R. Goodman

Download or read book Greed: A Confession - Poems written by D.R. Goodman and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greed: A Confession showcases D.R. Goodman’s honed sensitivity to the human experience and the natural world around us. Her sensible scientific background melds with a meditative outlook: “this// is a vertebra/ from a cow.// It will win no prize./ It is just the childish wonder/ from which the rest derives.” This collection is a wellspring of keen observations, insight and secrets of nature, freely spilling out for those greedy for knowledge and enlightenment—as in the immediacy of “a certain joy/ that depends on nothing” and “wraps a tightness around your heart.” Here is a masterfully crafted finalist for the 2013 Able Muse Book Award—one brimming with delight, wit and insight. PRAISE FOR GREED: A CONFESSION I feel incredibly fortunate to have learned of D. R. Goodman’s poetry. Her technical control and powers of observation are extraordinary; diction, meter, and rhyming, superb. Writing about an egret, she details its “mind,/ a laser-focused eye, the weight of will”—attributes that apply equally to the poet. In “Autumn in a Place Without Winter,” she says, “The season brings/ no clarity, but this: we’re here, alive. . . .” This poet is alive to everything. You want this book. It’s terrific. —Kelly Cherry Goodman is greedy for things of this world—not in the rapacious, bottom-line manner of plutocrats, misers, and Wall Street brokers but for the enlightenment of the senses and the enrichment of her poetry. She’s sharing the wealth she accumulates. —John Drury (from the foreword) At the core of Greed: A Confession are natural ironies, or disjunctures, or improbabilities replete with intrigue. The poems are frames through which we view the events. D.R. Goodman is a scientist of natural history, which, for her, includes human experience. The poet shows us how to see. The deep pleasure she takes in the process displays itself, with characteristic irony, in “A Certain Joy.” —Clive Matson D.R. Goodman’s carefully crafted poems register a deep appreciation of the intricate meanings emanating from Nature’s tangible riches. “Depth cannot hide” from Goodman’s keen eye. “And so it flutters, sings,/ Betrays itself upon the face of things.” From the sudden appearance of a hundred tiny, freshly metamorphosed frogs, to ginkgo leaves’ brilliant, moonlit gold that “spurs imagination to those old/ heroic, dangerous quests of greed and sin,” the wondrous wealth of existence evokes joy that compels the poet to confess her “greed” in the presence of such good fortune. Even the blithe partake of a “certain joy”—certain: particular and definite—that is not attained or stumbled upon; it simply is—the gift of being: “There is a certain joy/ that depends on nothing./ One inhabits it./ It is there in the day/ when you walk out, whether chill and gray/ or magnified by light, and you inhale it.” Complex yet accessible, these formal and free-verse poems gift us with abundant insights to enjoy. —Beth Houston

The Borrowed World (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

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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

All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409322
Total Pages : 102 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems by : Richard Newman

Download or read book All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems written by Richard Newman and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the Wasted Beauty of the World, a finalist for the 2012 Able Muse Book Award, extols the beautiful as readily as it expounds on the blemished. The reasoned commingles with the rambunctious, as in the case of the speaker who declares that “our lives span diaper to diaper,/ and in between we piss on anyone/ we can.” Little escapes notice in these poems of gutsy realism and formal deftness, which freely highlight the fringes of society-the speaker in “Bellefontaine Cemetery” exhorts teens to “party on people’s graves” and have “a few close shaves with county sheriffs,” the carcass of a Ford truck intrudes on a hiking trail’s gully, the homeless are lullabied to “find rest behind our dumpster/ . . . score a fifth of bourbon/ and find your stomach full.” Richard Newman brings us a collection that prods and soars with the grit and beauty of the real world. PRAISE FOR ALL THE WASTED BEAUTY OF THE WORLD: Richard Newman’s All the Wasted Beauty of the World is masterful and magnetic, from the “galaxy of gnats” hovering in the St. Louis twilight to the way a backwoods junkyard “gnaws on a pile of old Ford bones.” He sees a group of bored high school kids with “nothing to lose/ but stupid summer jobs and innocence,” and captures with perfect acuity how “September rain in streetlight/ silvers the cypress needles, scatters new dimes/ among the nuisance alley mulberry trees.” Newman’s poems, with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible portraits of life in the cheap bars, back alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, surprise a hunger in us for a language larger, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than daily speech. -George Bilgere, author of Imperial The poems in Richard Newman's remarkable third collection, All the Wasted Beauty of the World, are heady explorers. They roam from Lost Man Pass to Benton Park, from downtown St. Louis to Southern Indiana, all the while balancing gorgeous musicality with lyric originality. In the midst of the wandering, there is longing in these poems-for place, for order, for morning. There is urgency, too, and beauty, wasted and otherwise, in places we don't always expect it. Newman is a bold and masterful formalist in a free-verse world, and he uses sonnets, aubades, villanelles, and odes to reconcile the geographies of the interior and exterior. Again and again, this collection makes us recalibrate our true north and forces us to reconsider the world for all of the unpredictable places where we can find beauty. -Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke Newman uses the power of recollection and imagery to craft odes, sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and free verse with titles like “Four Kids Pissing off the Overpass after a Cardinals Game.” Each poem calls our attention to a rough-and-tumble, everyday America we often drive past but overlook. All the Wasted Beauty of the World returns us to the real and, consequently, the new by putting on the brakes and asking us to look, if only briefly, beyond our rear-views. -Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

Cause for Concern (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

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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

Virtue, Big as Sin - Poems

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Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409179
Total Pages : 84 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Virtue, Big as Sin - Poems by : Frank Osen

Download or read book Virtue, Big as Sin - Poems written by Frank Osen and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtue, Big as Sin is impressively wide-ranging in theme and style. It illuminates everyday vignettes with solicitous spotlights such as the bereaved son sorting the contents of his father’s medicine cabinet, or the father whose son’s driver’s education recalls the time his own “unharnessed” Mustang went “bungeeing” around a bend; it celebrates the artist’s creative highs, or reflects on the misfortunate who is forever nearing the threshold of achievement, aware that life may prove a “most inept librettist” and should thus be paired with our “strongest song.” Osen’s dexterity with both formal and free verse is apparent. His wit and humor prevent the serious from becoming ponderous while his intelligent insight lends depth to the lighthearted. Reading and rereading this outstanding debut collection, it is easy to see why—from the first poem to the last—it is a worthy winner of the 2012 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR VIRTUE, BIG AS SIN: Frank Osen’s Virtue, Big as Sin offers one witty, elegant poem after another. The rhymes are especially clever, the meter sure, the stanzas well-shaped, but this poet’s sense of proportion is also reflected in wisdom (and what is wisdom but a sense of proportion?). An urbane maker of sparkling phrases like “that genuine Ur of the ersatz,” Osen can also write plainly, movingly, about a young girl’s funeral. And he reflects often on art itself, which he so rightly calls “the conjured awe.” —Mary Jo Salter (Judge, 2012 Able Muse Book Award) In his talent for tragedy and comedy, and for mixing them, Osen takes his place in a distinguished line of English-language poets that runs from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our day. —Timothy Steele (from the afterword) Reading Virtue, Big as Sin has left me with the sense of satisfaction and enduring pleasure that really good poetry always produces, even when it also does the rest of what honest writing may do: confirm suspicions about ourselves we wish we could refute, bring to mind aspects of nature we’d rather forget, and deliver alarming news about the future, both public and private. Frank Osen does all of this and much more, all with grace and wit, in language that makes the messenger thoroughly “one of us.” —Rhina P. Espaillat Frank Osen’s poems revel in beauty and pleasure, in technical dexterity and high-gloss finish. Readers who care about such things will be abundantly rewarded. But the reveling is haunted by loss, awful possibilities of failure, a nothingness glimpsed beneath the carnival. One of Osen’s avowed tutelary spirits is Wallace Stevens, and his probing of his subjects can often seem like an extended, heart-wrenching commentary on Stevens’s line, “Death is the mother of Beauty.” The fragility of beauty, the omnipresence of death, and the intimate connections between them, are everywhere present in these marvelously heartening and effective poems. —Dick Davis