Uncontested Grounds Poems

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Uncontested Grounds - Poems

Author : William Conelly
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

Bad Fame - Poems

Author : Martin McGovern
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

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

All the Wasted Beauty of the World - Poems

Author : Richard Newman
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

Greed: A Confession - Poems

Author : D.R. Goodman
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

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

Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic - Poems

Author : Anna M. Evans
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1773490133
Total Pages : 82 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (734 download)

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Book Synopsis Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic - Poems by : Anna M. Evans

Download or read book Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic - Poems written by Anna M. Evans and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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

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

Sea Level Rising - Poems

Author : John Philip Drury
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

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.

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

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

Figuring in the Figure

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

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Book Synopsis Figuring in the Figure by : Ben Berman

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

Animal Psalms - Poems

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

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Book Synopsis Animal Psalms - Poems by : Alfred Nicol

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

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 2015 (No. 19 - print edition)

Author : Alexander Pepple
Publisher : Able Muse Press
ISBN 13 : 1927409624
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (274 download)

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Book Synopsis Able Muse, Summer 2015 (No. 19 - print edition) by : Alexander Pepple

Download or read book Able Muse, Summer 2015 (No. 19 - print edition) written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2015 issue, Number 19. 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 - Wayne Levin; (Interviewed by Sharon Passmore). FEATURED POET - Eric McHenry; (Interviewed by Cody Walker). FICTION - Linda Boroff, Richard Dokey, Michael Bradburn-Ruster, Zara Lisbon, Lane Kareska. ESSAYS - Catharine Savage Brosman, Kevin Durkin, Robert Earle, Eric Torgersen. BOOK REVIEWS - Reagan Upshaw. POETRY - Jay Rogoff, Meredith McCann, William Baer, Jan D. Hodge, Stephen Scaer, William Thompson, Martial, Susan McLean, Carrie Shipers, Maura Stanton, Stephen Gibson, Len Krisak, Glenn Freeman, Richard Cecil, Bruce Bennett, Julie Steiner, Eric Torgersen, Ed Shacklee.