Download or read book Walking in on People Able Muse Book Award written by Melissa Balmain and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Melissa Balmain’s Walking in on People, the serious is lightened with a generous serving of wit and humor, and the lighthearted is enriched with abundant wisdom. She shows us how poetry can be fun yet grounded in everyday challenges and triumphs, with subjects ranging from the current and hip (Facebook posts, online dating, layoffs, retail therapy, cell-phone apps, trans fat), to the traditional and time-tested (marriage, child-rearing, love, death). Through it all, her craft is masterful, with a formal dexterity deployed with precision in a showcase of forms such as the villanelle, ballad, triolet, nonce, and the sonnet. It is little wonder then that Walking in on People is the winner of the 2013 Able Muse Book Award, as selected by the final judge, X.J. Kennedy. This is a collection that will not only entertain thoroughly, but also enlighten and reward the reader. PRAISE FOR WALKING IN ON PEOPLE: Walking in on People grabbed me with its very title, and it never let go. Poetry these days is rarely so entertaining, so beautifully crafted, so sharp of eye, yet so wise and warm of heart. Melissa Balmain keenly perceives faults in people and in our popular culture, with piercing wit but never bitterness. Don’t miss the wonderful “Lament,” on what it takes to write a best seller, or “The Marital Bed,” a love poem with naturalistic detail. She really commands her art. Indeed, I think any poet who rhymes lobsters and Jersey mobsters deserves to have an equestrian statue of herself erected in Bangor or Newark or both. — X.J. Kennedy (Judge, 2013 Able Muse Book Award) Melissa Balmain’s poems add to the rhythmic bounce of light verse a darker, more cutting humor. The result is an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic. — Billy Collins So many of the poems in Melissa Balmain’s triumphant debut lodge themselves in that Frostian zone where they are hard to get rid of. They recur in the mind in moments of hilarity and pathos, of exaltation and mortification, and they never let us go. — David Yezzi (from the foreword) Accessible and entertaining poetry doesn't often prevail over the grim personal memoir in poetry contests, but this time the judges were smart. They went for Melissa Balmain's stylish and always metrically perfect wit. You can relate to this poetry if you have ever: longed to save the restaurant lobsters from their fate, lost your lover to his electronic devices, faced the fact that babies are ugly and toddlers suppress your genius, or (of course) walked in on people in all the wrong places. With diverse forms, inventive rhymes, the right word always chosen and a sense of humor always in evidence—you really have no excuse not to buy this book. — Gail White

Download or read book The Witch Demands a Retraction written by Melissa Balmain and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pinocchio Runs for Office, The Peeved Piper, Not So Snow White and so many more in this twisted collection of adult fairy tales! This hilarious collection of poems by Melissa Balmain puts a grown-up, contemporary spin on the stories and characters we all learned as children, from Little Red Riding Hood, to the Three Bears, the Pied Piper, and Cinderella; each delightfully depicted in full-color by Ron Barrett, (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) one of the best and award winning illustrators in the business. Early Praise for The Witch Demands a Retraction: "If you're looking for the perfect bedtime poetry to send your little ones peacefully to dreamland, keep moving. In The Witch Demands a Retraction, Melissa Balmain's poetic retakes of classic fairytales, 'happy endings' means something else, and Mama Bear finds a clue in her bed that Goldilocks was not after the porridge. Witty, cringey, and hilarious. For every parent who wants a break from sincerity, and for every bad aunt or uncle looking for the perfect gift - this is your book." - Tom Bodett, author and NPR personality "This is an extremely irresponsible book - imprudent, unconscionable, certain to emotionally scar impressionable children for life. I highly recommend it." - Gene Weingarten, syndicated humor columnist, The Washington Post "Like Leopold and Loeb, Balmain and Barrett are a pair that will go down in history-not that I'm implying anything. It's just that when the right pair gets together at the right time, great things happen. And if a cousin or two had to die for this book? Totally worth it." - Michael Gerber, Publisher, The American Bystander "Does anyone say, 'OH NO SHE DI-INT!' anymore? Because that will be your response to basically every poem in this treat of a book. Balmain turns every fairy tale on its head and shows us its panties, none the worse for wear. Just don't be drinking anything while you read, because these verses are a recipe for spit takes. Balmain has a warped mind and astonishing wit matched thoroughly by her warm heart. Come for the fart joke, stay for the sly and bawdy feminism."- Faith Salie, comedian, author, journalist, seen & heard on CBS, NPR & PBS

Download or read book One Night Two Souls Went Walking written by Ellen Cooney and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young interfaith chaplain is joined on her hospital rounds one night by an unusual companion: a rough-and-tumble dog who may or may not be a ghost. As she tends to the souls of her patients—young and old, living last moments or navigating fundamentally altered lives—their stories provide unexpected healing for her own heartbreak. Balancing wonder and mystery with pragmatism and humor, Ellen Cooney (A Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances) returns to Coffee House Press with a generous, intelligent novel that grants the most challenging moments of the human experience a shimmer of light and magical possibility.

Download or read book Romance Language Able Muse Book Award for Poetry written by Amy Glynn and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2024-01-02 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amy Glynn's Romance Language is a wellspring of culture, nature, natural phenomena, myths, esoterica. A kaleidoscope of sciences and disciplines—spanning archeology, acoustics, botany, zoology, psychology, cosmology, meteorology, mythology—are freely juxtaposed with the bliss of romance gained to longing for the one lost, the celebration of nature and the teeming creatures therein to hope for their enduring sustenance. A logophilic showcase and worthy winner of the 2022 Able Muse Book Award, Romance Language transports the reader into a sensory and cerebral world of the real and imagined, ever reaching for stimulus, wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment. PRAISE FOR ROMANCE LANGUAGE Romance Language thrills to the natural world in all its boggling multiplicity, while reserving a barrage of tart ironies for the fallen humans who inhabit it—the lovers who fail us and those, long gone, we can never let go of. Glynn understands that science is no check to mystery, that we subsist in “an ocean of cadence” that was here before us: “The beginning was music. There was music first.” Her songs channel that original music “of tide, chaos, and rhythm” with such fierceness and sorrow that we are compelled to listen. Their effect is revelatory. —David Yezzi, author of More Things in Heaven and Late Romance: Anthony Hecht The poems in Romance Language consistently, and seemingly without effort, manage a remarkable feat: they’re unfailingly attentive to the situational subtext that underlies each foray, whether into nature, art, or mythology. With their rueful irony and wit, their candor and self-awareness, these poems are not only technically flawless but also insistently, and sometimes tetchily, human. —Rachel Hadas, 2022 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Love and Dread Amy Glynn has built upon her naturalist’s precision, her musician’s ear, and her talent for unexpected but apt metaphor, with a heightened attention to what we learn in love. Romance Language is as much about language, though, as it is about romance. Glynn is a dazzling word-hoarder and -shaper. With serious wit, she entwines autobiography with the life of other creatures (most beautifully, birds) and knows our own scale in the landscape and seascape. For all her artifice, her plainest truths are the most moving, as when she hopes for a “gift // for seeing as a gift whatever happens / to us.” These poems “happen” to the reader as a great gift, too. —Mary Jo Salter, author of Zoom Rooms and The Surveyors Glynn brings a polymathic sensibility to her writing, conversant in both high and vernacular diction on subjects ranging widely from science and classical literature to current politics and pop culture. The poems—bold, vibrant, mercurial, mysterious, sometimes wickedly funny, and always highly musical—remind me that form is a living, breathing part of our contemporary canon. Whether fixed like the sonnet or ghazal, or nonce, or free verse—these poems are constructed with great passion and precision, and the result is a luminous, powerful, and utterly original outpouring. —Rebecca Foust, author of Paradise Drive and Only ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Amy Glynn is a poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. She is the author of A Modern Herbal (Measure Press, 2013). She has received the Troubadour Prize, The SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers, Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award, and two James Merrill House fellowships, among other honors. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Download or read book Trap Street Able Muse Book Award for Poetry written by Will Cordeiro and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2021-08-27 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will Cordeiro's Trap Street travels a shifting landscape. Keenly observed deserts, woods, highways, seaside enclaves, mountainsides, and motels parade in an expansive sweep of the natural and the manmade, often returning to inhabited settings and navigating spirited-to-tense family and social situations. Cordeiro's vivid musings are deployed with a precision of craft and diction, buttressed by symphonic wordsmithing worthy of a lexicographer. This exceptional debut poetry collection, winner of the 2019 Able Muse Book Award, does not look away from either grime or beauty, but lays bare the nature of things. PRAISE FOR TRAP STREET The formal elegance and beauty of these poems clash smartly with the hardscrabble world where they occur. Back-road towns and landscapes, down-and-out rust belt cities, the worn-out West-this is a book that bears witness to the fizzled American dream. What's left? Mindless jobs, litter, distraction, addiction, voiceless anxiety, environmental desecration, and we are to make a meaningful life from this. These are poems written in the long pastoral tradition, except the pristine, inspiring pasture-scene, starkly, is no longer there. I expect there is a bit of exaggeration here, along with the honest depiction, and that makes this a book both of witness and warning. -Maurice Manning, author of Railsplitter Trap Street is a map of vanishing dreams, true to the country as it struggles to exist. Yet the person who inhabits these poems has dignified the writing of them with real care and an ear for the elevated vernacular. His declaration that "Earth's everything I am" runs through every page of the book, mordant, restless, and abiding. -David Mason, 2019 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of The Sound "Not everything must have some cosmic meaning." That is the sort of red-wheelbarrow faith Will Cordeiro depends on as his adventurous eye records the variegated appearance of the natural and manmade world, no detail too small to merit commemoration. The scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus cited the "haecceitas" ("this-ness") of observed experience as one component in the quest for the divine, so there is every reason to regard Cordeiro's poems as bridging the gap between life's overlooked detritus and exalted vision itself. And visual acuity here is matched by a strenuous verbality, color-coordinated vowels informing chewable consonants in a lexicon ranging from "cattywampus" to "glumes" to "blear." It's a pied-beauty diction and syntax that remind me of Hopkins and Marianne Moore. We should all join in welcoming Will Cordeiro's amazing debut. -Alfred Corn, author of The Poem's Heartbeat ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Will Cordeiro has work published in Agni, Best New Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, the Offing, DIAGRAM, Poetry Northwest, Threepenny Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Will coedits the small press Eggtooth Editions and is grateful for a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a scholarship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Truman Capote Writer's Fellowship, as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, Ora Lerman Trust, Petrified Forest National Park, and Risley Residential College. Will received an MFA and PhD from Cornell University. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer's Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Currently, Will lives in Flagstaff and teaches in the Honors College at Northern Arizona University.

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

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.

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.

Download or read book Able Muse Translation Anthology Issue Summer 2014 No 17 Print Edition written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2014-05-25 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2014 issue, Number 17. 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: A TRANSLATION ANTHOLOGY FEATURE ISSUE - Guest Edited by Charles Martin EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. GUEST EDITORIAL - Charles Martin. ESSAYS - Michael Palma. POETRY TRANSLATIONS BY - X.J. Kennedy, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, William Baer, Willis Barnstone, Tony Barnstone, Michael Palma, Dick Davis, Jay Hopler, Ned Balbo, N.S. Thompson, John Ridland, Kate Light, John Whitworth, Andrew Frisardi, Diane Furtney, Teresa Iverson, Julie Kane, Maryann Corbett, Bilal Shaw, Mark S. Bauer, Michael Bradburn-Ruster, Heidi Czerwiec, Claudia Routon, Brett Foster, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Adam Elgar, Rima Krasauskytė, Kent Leatham, R.C. Neighbors, Deborah Ann Percy, Dona Roşu, Arnold Johnston, Maria Picone, Robert Schechter, Wendy Sloan, Jeff Sypeck, Ryan Wilson, Shifra Zisman, Laine Zisman Newman. POETRY TRANSLATIONS OF - Victor Hugo, Arthur Rimbaud, C.P. Cavafy, Fernando Pessoa, Miguel de Unamuno, Catullus, Charles Baudelaire, Francesco Petrarch, Rainer Maria Rilke, Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Horace, Martial, José Luis Puerto, José Corredor-Matheos, Cecco Angiolieri, Delmira Agustini, Heinrich Heine, Christine de Pizan, Nur Jahan, Ayesheh-ye afghan, Jahan Khanom, Reshheh, Gaspara Stampa, Dante Alighieri, Armand Sully Prudhomme, Gérard de Nerval, François Villon, Euripides, Georg Trakl, Nelly Sachs, Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, Gavin Douglas, William Fowler, William Dunbar, Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Malatesti, Giovanni Raboni, Fosildo Mirtunzio (Pseudonym), Zaharia Stancu, Paul Valéry, Tove Ditlevsen, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Giacomo Leopardi, Paul the Deacon, Giovanni Pascoli, Meleager, Lope de Vega, Dovid Zisman.

Download or read book Able Muse Winter 2019 No 27 print edition written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the annual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2019 issue, Number 27. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). Includes the tribute to Timothy Murphy special feature and the winning stories and poems from the 2019 Able Muse contest (Able Muse Write Prize) winners and finalists. ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry."-Dana Gioia. "Able Muse is refreshing to read for its selection of poetry that adheres to form . . . a quality magazine offering the reader informed and unexpected views on life."-NewPages. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2019 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION – Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists EDITORIAL – Alexander Pepple GUEST EDITORIAL – Richard Wakefield FEATURED ART – A Hunt Theme TRIBUTE TO TIMOTHY MURPHY FEATURE: --Tribute GUEST-EDITOR: Richard Wakefield --Tribute Poetry: A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Rhina P. Espaillat, John Ridland, Amit Majmudar, Wendy Videlock, Bruce Bennett, Len Krisak, Catherine Chandler, Terese Coe, Mary Meriam, Andrew Frisardi, Richard Meyer, John Beaton --Tribute Essay: Dana Gioia FICTION – Erin Russell ESSAYS – Edward Lee, Tony Whedon BOOK REVIEWS – Brooke Clark, Travis Biddick POETRY – Hailey Leithauser, John Philip Drury, Len Krisak, James Matthew Wilson, Suzanne Noguere, Alfred Nicol, Katie Hartsock, David MacRae Landon, Amy Bagan, Barry Abrams, Miriam O'Neal, Beth Paulson, Daniel Galef

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

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

Download or read book Dirge for an Imaginary World Poems written by Matthew Buckley Smith and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dirge for an Imaginary World from Matthew Buckley Smith is the winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award, selected by Andrew Hudgins. These are poems of breathtaking craftsmanship that find inspiration in the simplicity of the quotidian, or the perplexity of the grand. Smith is equally at ease musing about Neanderthals or God as he is with a ballet exam or highway medians. These poems of personal and universal introspection are filled with grace, and sparkle with abundant intelligence and wit. This masterful debut collection is an event to celebrate. PRAISE FOR DIRGE FOR AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Wildness and precision and passion balanced with wit—there are the hallmarks of Matthew Buckley Smith’s superb Dirge for an Imaginary World. In subjects great (“For the Neanderthals”) and small made great (“For the College Football Mascots”), the comic is rich with serious intent and gravity lightened with discerning wit. But only a poet who lifts heavy and unwieldy subjects—death, lost love, the absence of god—knows the imperatives of graceful balance. – Andrew Hudgins (Judge, 2011 Able Muse Book Award) In this deeply impressive debut volume of poetry, Dirge for an Imaginary World, Matthew Buckley Smith delivers a remarkable range of deft formal schemes, temporal movements, and varied settings. We encounter sonnets, couplets, quatrains, Sapphics, sestets and so forth written with a slick, delightful merging of technical expertise and smooth contemporary rhythms. The range of subjects is equally and as charmingly eclectic, from Neanderthals, Dante, Vermeer, for instance, to College Football Mascots, Highway Mediums, and Spring Ballet Exams. Mental and linguistic agility generously challenge the reader in poem after poem. – Greg Williamson (from the “Foreword”) “If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,” wrote Thomas Hardy, whose spirit moves through the fine poems of Matthew Buckley Smith’s debut collection. Like his blast-beruffled predecessor, Smith braves a clear-eyed look at our fallen world, mourning in elegantly precise language the sorrows inherent in “set(ting) out to map a promised land/ Out of reach and always just at hand,” but also wishing great mercy upon us travelers failed and failing. These are poems full of both reckoning and grace, made all the more beautiful for their humane wisdom. Dirge for an Imaginary World is immensely impressive. – Carrie Jerrell

Download or read book Able Muse a review of poetry prose and art Winter 2013 No 16 print edition written by Alexander Pepple and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2013 issue, Number 16. This issue continues the tradition of masterfully crafted poetry, fiction, essays, art & photography, and book reviews that have become synonymous with the Able Muse-online and in print. After more than a decade of online publishing excellence, Able Muse print edition maintains the superlative standard of the work presented all these years in the online edition, and, the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010). ". . . [ ABLE MUSE ] fills an important gap in understanding what is really happening in early twenty-first century American poetry." - Dana Gioia. CONTENTS: WITH THE 2013 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists. With the winner and runner-up sonnets from the 2013 Able Muse / Eratosphere Sonnet Bake-Off. EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple. FEATURED ARTIST - Peter Svensson. FEATURED POET - Jehanne Dubrow; (Interviewed by Anna M. Evans). FICTION - Cheryl Diane Kidder, Charles Wilkinson, Blaine Vitallo, Donna Laemmlen. ESSAYS - A.E. Stallings, Peter Byrne, Philip Morre, David Mason, Chrissy Mason. BOOK REVIEWS - Rory Waterman, Jane Hammons. POETRY - Rachel Hadas, R.S. Gwynn, Catharine Savage Brosman, John Savoie, D.R. Goodman, Jeanne Wagner, Richard Wakefield, Melissa Balmain, Tara Tatum, Anna M. Evans, Matthew Buckley Smith, Stephen Harvey, Elise Hempel, Marly Youmans, Amanda Luecking Frost, Rachael Briggs, Chris Childers, James Matthew Wilson, Alex Greenberg, Catullus, Sappho, Theocritus.

Download or read book Out Front the Following Sea written by Leah Angstman and published by Regal House Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out Front the Following Sea is a historical epic of one woman's survival in a time when the wilderness is still wild, heresy is publicly punishable, and being independent is worse than scorned--it is a death sentence. At the onset of King William's War between French and English settlers in 1689 New England, Ruth Miner is accused of witchcraft for the murder of her parents and must flee the brutality of her town. She stows away on the ship of the only other person who knows her innocence: an audacious sailor--Owen--bound to her by years of attraction, friendship, and shared secrets. But when Owen's French ancestry finds him at odds with a violent English commander, the turmoil becomes life-or-death for the sailor, the headstrong Ruth, and the cast of Quakers, Pequot Indians, soldiers, highwaymen, and townsfolk dragged into the fray. Now Ruth must choose between sending Owen to the gallows or keeping her own neck from the noose.

Download or read book World Too Loud to Hear written by Stephen Kampa and published by Able Muse Press. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear confronts today’s zeitgeist of dark social norms online or off. Our litany of individual and collective shortcomings is laid bare or castigated—as, for instance, with obligations we abhor, avoid, and “can’t wait / to pass down to the upstart generations.” The delivery ranges from straight or subtle to rants and execrations, while the settings range from historic and current affairs to the imaginary, dystopian, sci-fi, or surrealistic. This sui generis collection is fearless in hope, with a sobering take on our acceleratingly fearful national and global trajectory. PRAISE FOR WORLD TOO LOUD TO HEAR: Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear is a book about America’s “slow-motion, decades-long cascade / of violence . . .”—gun violence by and against children, violence of tech-driven accelerating change, and violence that permeates almost every aspect of our online lives. These amazing poems manage to be at once outraged and witty, inventive and passionate, nuanced and blunt. I can’t think of another book that captures so completely the lunatic reality of self-destruction. Stephen Kampa is fabulous poet, and this is a fabulous and important book. —Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out and Against Translation Stephen Kampa’s World Too Loud to Hear takes on the noise of the twenty-first century with a furious love and attention. The poems in this book lay out our terrible addictions—to gun violence, to scientism, to screens, to empty celebrity, to social division, to anger itself. But they also show us what remains worth saving from those evils: children, magic, and mystery. These poems delight equally in novel syllabic stanzas, calm iambics, and drumming accentuals, and they ratchet up poetic form to the tension of a crossbow, with the same deadly aim. They use change-up rhyme patterns, sonics, wordplay, and narrative drama to keep us tumbling forward, through etymology and child abuse, homage and political hackery, near-despair and struggling faith. And they often arrive at the sort of poetic closure that makes a reader freeze and gasp. —Maryann Corbett, author of In Code and Street View Juggling Horatian and Juvenalian satire with surgical wit and polemical yet coy imbalances, Stephen Kampa’s speakers are the needling social critics, cultural anthropologists, and litigator-jesters. I have not read a collection of poetry that better tackles social injustices and apathies, gun violence, religious hypocrisy, climate change, and our subservience to technology. Kampa shows us ourselves: combing the Almighty WebMD to wrangle with our psychosomatic homunculi, constructing our digital personae and elevating our experiences to impress other inflated personae, and being lured into divisiveness by cartoonish political buffoonery. In this World Too Loud to Hear, Kampa reminds us through his maw-opening critiques and funhouse mirrors that we have lost our benevolence and are becoming untethered from the one objective truth from which we humans can find insights: the natural world. —Adam Vines, author of Lures and Out of Speech ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, Articulate as Rain, and World Too Loud to Hear. He is a winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize, the Collins Prize, and the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry. He has been a resident at Art342 and at the Amy Clampitt House. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry. He has also worked as a musician and appears on multiple albums from WildRoots Records.

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