This Bed Our Bodies Shaped Poems

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This Bed Our Bodies Shaped: Poems

Author : April Lindner
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409004
Total Pages : 98 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis This Bed Our Bodies Shaped: Poems by : April Lindner

Download or read book This Bed Our Bodies Shaped: Poems written by April Lindner and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2012-07-11 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Bed Our Bodies Shaped from April Lindner is a finalist in the 2011 Able Muse Book Award. This collection is a celebration of the universal human experience—childhood, puberty, parenthood, aging—from a uniquely personal and sensual perspective. Lindner's craft, which finds masterful and original expression in metrical and free verse, enlivens each experience until we seem part of the scene. Eavesdropping on this engagingly narrated life gives us startling new insights into our own. PRAISE FOR THIS BED OUR BODIES SHAPED: April Lindner’s This Bed Our Bodies Shaped is a beautifully intimate and domestic book about the culture of family—what we bring to each other, boldly or tentatively, and what can never be known. Lindner pauses at the imprints we leave, what is buried under sand and snow, what returns to us again and again. Her poems are tender and fierce, startling in their excavations. – Denise Duhamel April Lindner’s sublimely intelligent and compassionate poems make This Bed Our Bodies Shaped the kind of book that becomes your friend on a bedside table. Here is a poet you can always trust. She never sacrifices complex layers of emotion for a simple treatise. This slender volume follows the pilgrim’s progress of girl into woman into lover into mother into maturity, in poems that both mark those thresholds and illuminate them with the brilliant specifics of a lived life. And the poet accomplishes all of this with the precision of a practiced harpist on the huge gold instrument of craft. April Lindner’s poems work with a muscular silkiness. Reading them is like discerning a bicep through a transparent sleeve. – Molly Peacock There are beautiful collisions in these poems, collisions between vulnerability and unflinching looks at our human condition, its truths and contradictions. There is an earned strength here and this book’s amplitude is heightened by terrific formal control (she knows her craft) and wild music. – Thomas Lux All the pleasures and pains of domestic life, of marriage and parenthood, love and loss, dailiness and major rites of passage, find their textures and music in the poems of April Lindner’s new collection. Her subtle mastery demonstrates again and again that the body itself creates the form of the poem, as surely as the bodies of the lovers shape their bed. The craft of these beautifully made verses is both seamless and palpable. – Mark Jarman

Last Wishes

Author : Rob Wright
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490710
Total Pages : 86 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Last Wishes by : Rob Wright

Download or read book Last Wishes written by Rob Wright and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2021-02-12 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rob Wright's Last Wishes is eclectic and delves into mining grit and lifestyle as fluently as it does into spiritual hopes and despairs, or the mind's lucidity and aberrations. Well-traveled in time and place, Last Wishes' culturally diverse characters and scenes--framed in Philadelphia, Fort Meyers, Manhattan, São Paulo, Kowloon, Majdanek, or elsewhere--are memorable or miserable. Accounts of ghosts and hauntings, imagined or real, include heart-stopping witness narratives of the Holocaust and other atrocities. This is a seasoned inaugural collection--a special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR LAST WISHES Rob Wright's poems in Last Wishes ache with a quiet, exquisite music. Whether at the edge of the forest, or before a mirror regarding his own face, or at the limit of what a son can feel for his father, Wright calls us to join him on his search for order and meaning, even as he questions what he finds: "The shell that holds all grief and memory, / in chains of molecules that make a mind, / will turn back into atoms, hungry, free. / We're spirits caught inside our skin and hair-- / ephemeral our dramas, spun from air." Such is the breathtaking beauty of Last Wishes, to long for what seems so close and yet, in the end, we cannot know. --Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems One of Wright's gifts is the age-old poetic magic of conveying beauty in what might at first appear to offer up nothing but ugliness. . . . It is fitting that one of the titles here is "Prologue for an Imaginary Play," because Wright's poems often are, in essence, little plays. The landscapes here are never static; like a photographer, or a cinematographer, Wright captures his subjects at their most revealing in a flash. Scenes are arranged and rendered at the moment of greatest drama and tension. --Alison Hicks (from the foreword), author of You Who Took the Boat Out The first poem in Last Wishes describes in evocatively exact and gritty detail a landscape of abandoned mines, and ends with the poet’s mind reaching out toward the miners who once worked there: “I thought/ how hunger drives a man to crawl beneath/ the brittle crust that shuts out sun and sky.” Moments like this are repeated again and again throughout this obsessively compelling book—a surface (often enough a fairly bleak one) is described in richly precise detail, and out of it pasts, ghosts, the dead, revenants and spectral appearances emerge with a kind of beckoning, unreachable clarity that is at times wistful and at times brutal. If these poems were photographs most of them would be in grimmest black and white, but they would make a most marvelously enthralling exhibition. —Dick Davis, author of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

Double-Parked, with Tosca

Author : Ellen Kaufman
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490672
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Double-Parked, with Tosca by : Ellen Kaufman

Download or read book Double-Parked, with Tosca written by Ellen Kaufman and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2021-05-14 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ellen Kaufman's Double-Parked, with Tosca navigates the natural and the manmade-often with an eye on their strained juxtaposition-or unravels the complex dynamics of the physical, social, and political. Kaufman can go from elegizing an Elizabethan old dress past to the environmentally conscious "now [when] the polar caps / undress themselves." She weaves the history of early settlements and their challenges and triumphs over the sometime inhospitable land; or negotiates the melding and mismatch of cultures in her native New York City. Kaufman's poems assert their claim inside violence, indifference, and exclusion. This surefooted second collection is a fitting special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. PRAISE FOR DOUBLE-PARKED, WITH TOSCA Ellen Kaufman's poems pierce the reader the way a needle pierces fabric. With a stunningly precise apprehension of the real, she stitches immigration histories and the intimacies of family life, cityscapes and suburban developments, the recent past and the perilous future. She has the power to shapeshift, too, so that we experience, as if from inside, the hidden life of a retired battleship, an algae bloom, a bird nesting in a traffic light. Marked by grief, endurance, and the truths of beauty made manifest, these are essential poems. - Jennifer Barber, author of Works on Paper Ellen Kaufman's absolutely terrific second book can fearlessly slash through pretext, but also cohere unlikely pairs through the X-ray delicacy of an ace metaphorist. She can use "he wanted to get laid" as a refrain in a satisfyingly avenging villanelle, and also see how a beret looks like a "fluffy flounder," and a chandelier handed down through generations "rattles like a skeleton." A tick can alternate stanzas with its host, and an orchestra can create a landscape from its instruments. Kaufman uses form-including a masterful crown of sonnets about her father's end of life-and the speaker herself takes form in persona poems of NYC landmarks; of the USS Intrepid, she writes, "the old moon / shuttle Discovery perches / like an aphid on a rose leaf." I bet you never heard that before! And so you will feel about this whole body of poems. Kaufman's wit, her craft, her vision-this book celebrates their collaboration. - Jessica Greenbaum, author of Spilled and Gone As a young person, the best poem I ever read in my life was a Petrarchan sonnet by Ellen Kaufman-before I even knew what a Petrarchan sonnet was. Now, in reading Ellen Kaufman's newest book, Double-Parked, with Tosca, I immediately see everything I want poetry to be: imaginative, evocative, observant, musical, filled with sound and living breath, and brilliant. I can't recommend this book and this author enough. - Nicholas Samaras, author of American Psalm, World Psalm ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ellen Kaufman's first collection, House Music, was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse, 2013). A poem from that book won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize awarded by Southwest Review, where it also appeared. Her poems have also been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Shenandoah, the Yale Review, and other literary magazines. Twice a MacDowell Fellow (2009 and 2013), she holds an AB from Cornell, and MFA and MSLS degrees from Columbia University. Formerly a poetry reviewer for Library Journal, she now reviews for Publishers Weekly. She lives near Straus Park in upper Manhattan.

In Code

Author : Maryann Corbett
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490540
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis In Code by : Maryann Corbett

Download or read book In Code written by Maryann Corbett and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Code was born out of Maryann Corbett’s years of work for the Minnesota Legislature, with a nonpartisan office that mandated that she maintain a public silence about politics. In poems that go from elegiac to fiery to funny, she examines behind-the-scenes legislative labor and the people who do it, the tensions of working for government in a climate hostile to government, and the buildings and grounds that put a beautiful face on a history full of ambiguities. This well-honed collection, Corbett's fifth, reflects on doublespeak and public poses; on coworkers and commutes; on legalese, courts, and elections; on news and history; and at last on retirement—through poems masterfully deployed in a dazzling array of forms: including the prose poem, the sonnet, the ghazal, the villanelle, and the canzone. Maryann Corbett is a candid, wistful, purposeful, and meditative poet in command of her craft. Of her years working for the Minnesota Legislature, Maryann Corbett writes in Rattle: "There was the frisson supplied by the constant presence of the media, the satisfaction of believing one's work served the public, the thrill of working with smart, motivated people, the pleasure of being surrounded by the striking buildings and gardens of the Capitol grounds, the sense of history. There was also the uncomfortable awareness that with every legislative session there are winners and losers, and that the same battles for justice are fought, and often lost, by the same people, year after year." In Code features poems that reflect on both those pleasures and that discomfort, as in these lines from "Seven Little Poems about Making Laws": Capitol café: German proverbs, whitewashed since 1917, are restored to view with bright applause. Old hatreds have new objects now. PRAISE FOR MARYANN CORBETT: Ned Balbo: . . . an extraordinary poet. Tony Barnstone: . . . metrical poetry infused with gorgeous imagery and the vernacular of our scientized world. Richard Wilbur: . . . accurate and delightful. Rhina P. Espaillat: . . . every section touches me and keeps calling me back. A.M. Juster: . . . wit without meanness, warmth without sentimentality, and craft without pretension. Geoffrey Brock: . . . one of the best-kept secrets of American poetry. Marilyn Taylor: . . . poignant, perceptive, exquisitely formed poems . . . a poet to be genuinely grateful for. Peter Campion: . . . a poet of the first order. Willis Barnstone: . . . a newborn Robert Frost, with a wicked eye for contemporary life. Susan McLean: . . . a stunner. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English in 1981, with a specialization in medieval literature and linguistics. She expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She is the author of five books of poetry and is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. Her work is widely published in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry 2018.

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

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

Frozen Charlotte

Author : Susan de Sola
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490389
Total Pages : 126 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Frozen Charlotte by : Susan de Sola

Download or read book Frozen Charlotte written by Susan de Sola and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2019-08-30 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte spans the breadth of human experience-from celebration to lamentation, from gravity to lightheartedness, from domestic and quotidian scenarios to historic upheavals and their aftermaths, both European and American. She skillfully deploys an impressive range of formal styles and free verse in her debut collection. De Sola's Frozen Charlotte manifests all the hallmarks of a seasoned poet in surefootedness, wit, and depth of empathy.

PRAISE FOR FROZEN CHARLOTTE

The breadth of Susan de Sola’s poetry, by turns gossamer light and solemnly elegiac, offers a pleasurable aesthetic surprise from poem to poem-from “sun-starved Dutchmen” to immigrant Jews in Manhattan, from tulips to the life of a friend whose actual name she never knew, from the imagined language of rocks to a war widow’s cedar closet, from the death of an infant to conjugal love. Susan de Sola evinces wit and knowingness, a dexterity with verse, a way with form. The pleasure of de Sola’s poetry is to be in the presence of virtuosity and insight, of a poet who knows what it means to be human, and when to be serious and when to be light.
-Mark Jarman, author of The Heronry

When I read Susan de Sola’s uncanny title poem “Frozen Charlotte” for the first time, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I feel the same about the book as a whole, a virtuoso grouping of form and topic, a book that is haunting, yet which also sparkles with a sense of humor that I much enjoyed. Susan de Sola, it seems, can write in any form. While this book is her first full-length collection, it is the work of a master craftsperson.
-Kim Bridgford, author of Undone

Whether their subject is a painting by Sargent, a gathering at the site of a Holocaust deportation center, or the bestial appearance of ATM machines, Susan de Sola’s poems seem animate with her vision: the poems breathe on the page. Part of de Sola’s power lies in her formal acumen. Every word here seems carefully sieved from the welter of English, and each poem’s form is perfectly matched to its ambition and music. De Sola’s tonal range is equally rich-she is by turns funny and dark, pensive and sly, her voice resounding in the reader’s head long after a poem’s final line. Like its memorable title poem, Frozen Charlotte intrigues, goes deep, surprises. It is a book rich with the pleasures the best poetry provides.
-Clare Rossini, author of Lingo

This book has many moods and many messages for any reader who pays the poems collected here the attention they deserve. At times it seems a fairground, at times a graveyard, and neither cancels the other out. It is a mark of Susan de Sola’s always persuasive rhetoric that we see that both characterizations are somehow, simultaneously, true, and that despite their exhilarating variety these poems are of a piece and come from one complex, sophisticated, supremely alert sensibility.
-Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another Language

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Susan de Sola’s poems have appeared in many venues, such as the Hudson Review and PN Review, and in anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. She is a winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize and the Frost Farm Prize. She holds a PhD in English from the Johns Hopkins University and has published essays and reviews as Susan de Sola Rodstein. Her photography is featured in the chapbook Little Blue Man. A native New Yorker, she lives near Amsterdam with her family.

Time Is Always Now

Author : Rebecca Starks
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490427
Total Pages : 116 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Time Is Always Now by : Rebecca Starks

Download or read book Time Is Always Now written by Rebecca Starks and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now unfolds against a backdrop of nature, often permeated in unexpected ways with the human dynamics of family, neighborhood, and nation. Her poems convey the urgency within moments of transformation—whether seasonal, as in wilderness and garden; physical, as in the trajectory of youth, aging, and death; or political, as in the challenges of misgovernance and the environmental exigencies of our time. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a finely wrought, thought-provoking collection.

PRAISE FOR TIME IS ALWAYS NOW

Drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Emily Dickinson, Apocalypse Now, fairy tales, and social media, Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now deftly balances intelligence and pathos, resisting easy dichotomies and judgments. As these fine poems insist, the present is relentless, and we are immersed: “No, not out of time; helplessly in it.” Ours is a country of guns; ours is a “middle-aged earth” in decline—and yet, we are here, witnessing, questioning. I am grateful for Starks’s voice in the present moment, and I’m grateful to have her poems to carry with me into the future, whatever it may bring.
—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Rebecca Starks writes with a sense that time can be stopped in a poem, lives suspended and drawn inward, even in the most aimless moments. There’s a wonderful clarity to Time Is Always Now, an electricity that feels bright and wild. It’s to be found in the roadsides and a robin’s “clutch,” in the retina that “registers pain,” in the sky at dusk and the “months of mud.” I greet these poems with so much enthusiasm—these poems that crave, clarify, and propose sublime ways to become refreshed in our most confused times.
—David Biespiel (from the foreword), author of Republic Café

At one point, Rebecca Starks describes a winter hike, in which she crosses “sociable mouse hops, two feet together” and passes “a squirrel’s scramble at the base of a tree,/ then the bunched landings of a mustelid bound/ from the yawn under one log to another.” Several of her wonderful book’s qualities are evidenced here. If too many poets, in their ignorance, regard nature as a mere repository of metaphor, Starks, like Frost, is both knowledgeable and uncannily accurate about it. (“Yawn” is the perfect word, say, in this passage.) Her sinuous and heavily subordinated syntax is also suggestive of a mind with great range—geographical, thematic, and prosodic—though she can also, as, for instance, in “American Flag,” move by a cunning terseness.
—Sydney Lea, author of The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University, and works as a freelance editor and as a teacher for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in Baltimore Review, Ocean State Review, Slice Literary, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Winner of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and past winner of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, she is the founding editor-in-chief of Mud Season Review and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She and her family live in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond, Vermont.

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

Naked for Tea

Author : Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490176
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Naked for Tea by : Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Download or read book Naked for Tea written by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2018-07-09 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naked for Tea, a finalist in the Able Muse Book Award, is a uniquely uplifting and inspirational collection. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer's poems are at times humorously surreal, at times touchingly real, as they explore the ways in which our own brokenness can open us to new possibilities in a beautifully imperfect world. Naked for Teaproves that poems that are disarmingly witty on the surface can have surprising depths of wisdom. This is a collection not to be missed. PRAISE FOR NAKED FOR TEA Most anyone can make lemonade out of lemons. However, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s welcoming voice, receptive heart, artistic mastery, and empathic vision become an alchemy of being. Out of mudslides, misunderstandings, the exploits of Wild Rose, deep loss, and chocolate cake that sinks in the center, she makes courage, care, joy, and compassion. When “what’s the use” breaks down the back door, she is there, her great good soul encouraging us to sigh, laugh, renew our attention, and feel grateful for and delighted by any cake that sinks in the center. — Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch Heart-thawingly honest, deliriously sexy, and compassionate down to the fingertips. A book of kindness and bewilderment and delight from one of our best poets. — Teddy Macker, author of This World There is still rich ore in the Colorado San Juans. Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a treasure. In an era of seeming nonstop, subject-matterless, first person mirror dancing at the Temple of Narcissus incomprehension, it is a delight to find a poet who can tell a crackling story laced with gorgeous imagery and euphony that will appeal to the ancient seats of learning: the heart, belly, and brain. These are poems Sappho and Horace would love: they delight and instruct. They can be read and sung, and they will echo from the proverbial Colorado mountaintops through the archetypal red rock canyons of your mind. Prepare thyself to be smitten and to fall in love. — David Lee, Utah State Poet Laureate emeritus, author of Last Call and A Legacy of Shadows Reading Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is to float upon a never-ending waterfall of wonder . . . Pay attention. The elegance of her simplicity will blind you to her mastery. Then, she will let you fall, head over heels, in Love. With everything. — Wayne Muller (from the foreword), author of Sabbath and Legacy of the Heart

Pearl

Author : John Ridland
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409896
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Pearl by : John Ridland

Download or read book Pearl written by John Ridland and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2018-09-24 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pearl is an intricate fourteenth-century poem written by one of the greatest Middle English poets—the anonymous artist who also gave us Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This medieval masterpiece presents the meditative Dream Vision of a father (the Dreamer) mourning the loss of a young daughter (his Pearl). Having recently translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to critical acclaim, John Ridland now tackles the even more challenging Pearl. He succeeds in giving us another innovative and pleasurable translation that retains line-by-line fidelity with the source material, while bringing the fourteenth-century Northwest Midland dialect into an unstrained contemporary idiom. Ridland's inventive meter and rhyme convey the sonic beauty of the original. Moreover, his preface provides a comprehensive background and analysis of Pearl, points out the techniques deployed by the original poet, and explains Ridland's own approach to translating the poem. This translation will delight and reward the reader. PRAISE FOR JOHN RIDLAND’S TRANSLATION OF PEARL: John Ridland’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight made that fourteenth-century chivalric romance not only accessible but alive to our twenty-first century sensibilities. Now his translation Pearl, also by the anonymous Gawain Poet, does the same for that poignant dream vision. The poem’s formal complexities are still here, mutatis mutandis, but they enhance rather than obscure the story of a grieving father’s dream vision of his lost daughter in paradise. Six hundred years vanish, and the reader feels an intimate, profound emotional connection with the universal human experiences of loss, grief, and hope. —Richard Wakefield, author of A Vertical Mile An attractively readable translation, which makes a real attempt to convey the metrical beauty and intricacy of the original. —Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, editors of The Works of the Gawain Poet After reading John Ridland’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight some time ago, I thought, “Well, he’s done it now: doomed himself to never achieving anything as remarkable as this again, because it’s impossible.” But I was wrong: his new translation of Pearl—an even more challenging work by the same anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain Poet—is equally musical and moves with the same charmed pace in the telling that is perfect for what is being told. —Rhina P. Espaillat, author of Her Place in These Designs John Ridland’s translation offers us, in accessible, contemporary English, all the dazzling complexity and beauty of Pearl’s structures, rhythms, and rhymes. —Maryann Corbett, winner, Willis Barnstone Translation Prize; author of Street View

And after All

Author : Rhina P. Espaillat
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490192
Total Pages : 130 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis And after All by : Rhina P. Espaillat

Download or read book And after All written by Rhina P. Espaillat and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2019-04-26 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhina P. Espaillat’s And after All meditates on the passage of time. The perspective sweeps from the panorama of foreign landmarks to the close view of a lover’s feet in failing health, held and cared for. And after All displays the wit, wisdom, subtle voice, and supple mastery of forms that have established Espaillat as a contemporary master. This long-awaited collection from Espaillat is a treat not to be missed. PRAISE FOR AND AFTER ALL Rhina P. Espaillat’s And After All combines the formal fluency of Richard Wilbur, the precision of Elizabeth Bishop, and the easy conversational tones of Frank O’Hara, and yet her poems speak in a voice that is distinctively her own. They address the loss of loved ones and loved things of the world, but their extraordinary empathy and gentle wit keep them from becoming depressing or sentimental. Savor this book and share it with people you love. —A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze & Slander: New and Selected Comic Verse, 1995–2015 Rhina P. Espaillat, more than any living poet in English, gives ordinary language the glow of the sacred. Workaday words, trite with custom like thin coins, accrue new resonance and weight; plain objects are haloed with aureoles like figures in gold mosaics. Saints with their visions used to do this: wave away the veils that separate our shallow perceptions from a deeper reality. But not everyone is granted visions. How much harder it is to use the same words we all use and misuse, the same objects we all touch and ignore, common experiences we dismiss, and, by using words with precision, using the serendipity of rhyme, and the convention of metrical patterns, to give the reader the experience of revelation. Craft is not the opposite of inspiration, Espaillat reminds us, it is the only way to it. —A. E. Stallings, author of Olives For most of its poems And After All is, as the title indicates, deeply elegiac in tone. There are many poignant evocations of the past in the book, rich with quotidian surface detail but always suffused with undemonstrative but palpably real emotion. A poem about the poet’s grandmother, a tough no-nonsense farmer’s wife who described how cows inarticulately but unmistakably grieved when they realized their calves were to be slaughtered, ends with the line, “She told it simply, but she faltered there.” In its quiet pathos the line seems to sum up much of the book; exactness, no fuss, unforced fidelity to the anecdote, but the tremor of poignant empathy always present. A very eloquent collection of beautifully crafted poems, and one that it is hard to read dry-eyed. —Dick Davis, author of Love in Another Language

The Cynic in Extremis

Author : Jacob M. Appel
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 177349015X
Total Pages : 78 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis The Cynic in Extremis by : Jacob M. Appel

Download or read book The Cynic in Extremis written by Jacob M. Appel and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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.

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

Vellum - Poems

Author : Chelsea Woodard
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