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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 TOSCAEllen 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 PaperEllen 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 GoneAs 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 PsalmABOUT 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.

Susan de Sola' Frozen Charlotte spans the breadth of human experience, going from celebration to lamentation, from gravity to lightheartedness, from quotidian scenarios to historic tumults, including the Holocaust.

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, S├úo 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 WISHESRob 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 PoemsOne 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 OutThe 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 ShirazABOUT THE AUTHOR:After working for three decades in film production, Rob Wright has now chosen to spend his time writing. He currently serves as associate fiction editor for Able Muse, and has been awarded three Fellowships in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has published fiction, reviews, and poetry in Able Muse, Angle, Big City Lit, the Evansville Review, Measure, Rattle, String Poet, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. A finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, he recently was awarded the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry and was honored to give a reading at the home of Frost in Derry, New Hampshire.

The Powow River Poets Anthology II continues the tradition of memorable poetry from the Powow River Poets. This group of uniquely talented, award-winning writers is centered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, but includes members from the Boston area and from as far away as New York and Maine. Twenty-seven poets are represented in this volume of the anthology, including Rhina P. Espaillat, A.M. Juster, and Deborah Warren. Here, find masterful poems in form and free verse, on an eclectic range of subjects spanning the domestic to the global, celebrations to mourning, the whimsical to the heartbreaking. It is especially a showcase of the formal prowess of these accomplished poets. The dazzling array of given and nonce forms, including blank verse, triolet, abecedarian, sonnet, villanelle, sestina, and more will inspire with many examples of craftsmanship heightening emotional engagement and insight.PRAISE FOR THE POWOW RIVER POETS ANTHOLOGY II:Dedicated to the late Powow River Poet, David Berman, The Powow River Poets Anthology II continues in the splendid tradition of the group’s previous tome, published in 2006. Twenty-seven poets touch on themes ranging from the simple joys of friendship, nature, and art, to the complex issues of faith and doubt, love and loss. Guffaw-inducing humor and biting wit abound, as well as solemn reflections on suicide, domestic violence, social injustice, betrayal, illness, aging, and death. In Rhina P. Espaillat’s beautiful villanelle, “Guidelines,” included in this collection, the poet wisely urges us to find something to love, perhaps “a line of verse . . . that feels like the world’s heart since time began.” Beyond question, the poems in The Powow River Poets Anthology II echo the world’s heart.   -Catherine Chandler, author of Pointing HomeIt might be far-fetched to suggest that the Muses have sprinkled a generous share of their gifts into the waters of the Powow River . . . [near] the historic town of Newburyport . . . where the Powow River Poets established their home base three decades ago-but how else to explain the lyric fluency, robust talent, and refreshing wit that consistently distinguish this group?   -Leslie Monsour (from the introduction), author of The House SitterThe Powow River Poets are a group known for their concern with the craftsmanship of verse, and for the formal dexterity and precision of their poems-qualities profusely exemplified in this new collection. As might be expected, there are tricky forms in abundance here-sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina-but what is so memorable about so many of the poems is their continual precision of observation and depth of nuanced feeling. To paraphrase Pope, come for the flow of reason, stay for the feast of soul. This is a really delightfully various and moving collection, one to browse happily in and return to often.   -Dick Davis, author of Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of ShirazABOUT THE AUTHOR:The Powow River Poets are a gathering of widely published, award-winning New England poets, centered in Newburyport, Massachusetts, but including members from the Boston area and from as far away as New York and Maine. More about the Powow River Poets can be found at powowriverpoets.com.

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 PeppleGUEST EDITORIAL ? Richard WakefieldFEATURED ART ? A Hunt ThemeTRIBUTE 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 GioiaFICTION ? Erin RussellESSAYS ? Edward Lee, Tony WhedonBOOK REVIEWS ? Brooke Clark, Travis BiddickPOETRY ? 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

Character Shoes, Kate Light's posthumous collection, exhilarates and enchants like a command performance. The gifts and the curse of the young Sleeping Beauty in Tchaikovski's ballet ("Some fairy picked/ and pricked her for all time") become a metaphor for the initial spark of inspiration within the child whose life would be spent in the performing arts. Whether Light's subject is the pursuit and performance of onstage excellence, the power of love for good or ill, or the joys and challenges of wordsmithing, the poems of this beloved New York City Opera violinist are always entertaining and enlightening.PRAISE FOR CHARACTER SHOESKate Light published her first three books in a little less than ten years, which perhaps did not allow enough time for those of us who read her work then to realize just how original a poet Kate was, in her intricate music, her uncommon measures, her unsparingly personal matter. Now we have her fourth book of poems and sonnets, Character Shoes, a posthumous work that gathers most of the lyric poems she wrote in the years after those books appeared. One can only hope that many new readers will be drawn to this most personal of poets and share her work for its grace, courage, and elegance. - Charles MartinWhatever their subjects-childhood recollections, a trip to Italy, the life of a dancer and musician, relationships both happy and unhappy, or language itself-the poems of Character Shoes are distinguished throughout by the sparkling wit, mastery of craft, and depth of feeling that inform Kate Light's unique body of work. The last poem in this last book of hers begins, "Words, we ask so much of you." What she asked of the words she chose was answered in the form of these beautiful and memorable poems. - Michael PalmaIn Character Shoes, we see how early engagement with the arts fired Kate Light with an unquenchable creative flame. Light's instantly recognizable voice is conversational and most often informally formal. Add the twists and turns of a mind in the act of thinking, wit, drama, dialogue, and the voltage of rhyme and you have the strategies that are her second nature. The one word not to be found in this book is cancer. It is, indeed, a book of life. Everyday life makes its appearance in the animated camaraderie of an opera rehearsal, train rides, portraits of people met, and musings on how technology has changed the course of courtship. There is another relationship that Light holds dear: that with the reader. How good it is to say that this relationship endures. - Suzanne Noguere (from the foreword)ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Kate Light's works include three previous volumes of poetry: Gravity's Dream (winner of the Donald Justice Award), Open Slowly (Zoo Press), and The Laws of Falling Bodies (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize). Her poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, the Hudson Review, Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, the Dark Horse, Mezzo-Camin, the Formalist, Evansville Review, New York Sun, the anthologies Western Wind, Villanelles, Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century, Poetry Daily, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Garrison Keillor's Good Poems for Hard Times among other publications, and was featured in the Durham, NC, "Poetry on the Bus" series, as well as several times on Keillor's the Writers Almanac. Author of several multi-genre works, including libretti and lyrics, she read widely, taught at Hunter College, and was also a professional violinist. Kate died on April 13, 2016, of complications from breast cancer.

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Winter 2018 issue, Number 26. 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."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 2018 ABLE MUSE WRITE PRIZE FOR POETRY & FICTION - Includes the winning story and poems from the contest winners and finalists.EDITORIAL - Alexander Pepple.FEATURED ART - A Couples theme.FEATURED POET - Matthew Buckley Smith; (Interviewed by Joanna Pearson).FICTION - Anthony J. Otten, Claudette E. Sutton.ESSAYS - Stella Pye, Michael Cohen, Sam Aaron Morgan.BOOK REVIEWS - Brooke Clark.POETRY - Amit Majmudar, Gabriel Spera, Lynn Marie Houston, Maryann Corbett, D. R. Goodman, Heinrich Heine, Terese Coe, Andrew Firsardi, Alexis Sears, Ann M. Thompson, Melissa Cannon, David Allen Sullivan, Rob Wright.

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 CHARLOTTEThe 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 HeronryWhen 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 UndoneWhether 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 LingoThis 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 LanguageABOUT 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. She is a faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference, and a featured poet at the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival. A native New Yorker, she lives near Amsterdam with her family.

Jennifer Reeser’s Indigenous is, by turns, a celebration of her Native American heritage and a lamentation decrying the social injustice and tragedies endured. Through Reeser’s sublime craft and formal prowess, ancestral memories and spirits—both the immediate and the historical—are visited with chants, prayers, or rituals: be it imagined, culled, or translated in the backdrop of history, myth, and lore. Reeser also immerses us in her mixed-race heritage, in the “bloody war/ Inside of me, between the Red and White.” This collection is as uniquely inspirational and thought-provoking as it is fun—a collection not to be missed.PRAISE FOR INDIGENOUSThe beauty of this collection of poems is the way it uses every device capable of reaching the reader. These poems go behind the familiar: Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, figures such as Sequoyah and Chief Joseph; past the artifacts, legends, and folkways encountered through reading and travels across America, to the intimate details of a specific family and their lives and world seen from the inside. They give, as our literature seldom does, moral weight to the real and living representatives of those nations, rather than to the romanticized or demonized figures imagined by film. In all, Indigenous is more than simply a good read, or a compelling account of events we need to know better: it’s an addition to our national literature by Jennifer Reeser—an accomplished poet who knows, and understands intimately, what she is so generously sharing in her work.—Rhina P. Espaillat, author of And After AllJennifer Reeser’s new book of poems, Indigenous, provokes a strange sensation in the reader: an alien yet familiar landscape peopled with recurring characters, the mingling ghosts of history haunting the here and now and reanimating the myth and lore of her folk, both tragic and comic—as inseparable from Reeser’s imagination as they are from her blood. Each poem enters into dialogue with the reader even as it maintains an ongoing conversation of sound and sense with the other poems in the collection, a steady, sturdy examination of essential tensions: what it means to be a descendant of the First Nations, an heir to Christian grace, and a poet writing in modern American.Already a master of poetic forms, Reeser has reapplied her talent in what amounts to a major development in her repertoire, bringing the reader to that Native American borderland of the heart that has apparently been a major part of her life, but a part we’ve only seen in glimpses up to now.—Joseph O’Brien, poetry editor of the San Diego ReaderABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jennifer Reeser is the author of five collections of poetry. Her first, An Alabaster Flask, was the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize. X. J. Kennedy wrote that her debut “ought to have been a candidate for a Pulitzer.” Her third, Sonnets from the Dark Lady and Other Poems, was a finalist for the Donald Justice Prize. Her fourth, The Lalaurie Horror, debuted as an Amazon bestseller in the category of Epic Poetry. Reeser’s poems, reviews, and translations of Russian, French, along with the Cherokee and various Native American Indian languages, have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, the Hudson Review, Recours au Poème, LIGHT Quarterly, the Formalist, the Dark Horse, SALT, Able Muse, and elsewhere. A biracial writer of Anglo-Celtic and Native American Indian ancestry, Reeser was born in Louisiana. She studied English at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and also in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her former home. 

This is the seminannual Able Muse Review (Print Edition) - Summer 2018 issue, Number 25. 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 ART - A Flight theme.FEATURED POET - Aaron Poochigian (Interviewed by Chris Childers).FICTION - Michael Woodson, Vincent Yu.ESSAYS - Charles Martin, Barbara Haas.BOOK REVIEWS - Brooke Clark.POETRY - Timothy Murphy, Dan Campion, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Catullus, George David Clark, Katy Rawdon, M. Ann Hull, Mark Blaeuer, Ranjani Neriya, Roy Bentley, Susan de Sola, Susan McLean, Ryan Wilson.

The recurrent theme of "home" connects the wide-ranging subjects of Lorna Knowles Blake's Green Hill. These exquisitely crafted poems in free verse and metrical forms include conversations with such masters as Homer, Blake, Lorca, Saint John of the Cross, Giacomo Puccini, and Duke Ellington, in addition to reflections upon marvels of the natural world-oceans, flowering trees, birds' nests. Green Hill is delightful, enlightening and inspirational, and an exceptional winner of the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR GREEN HILLIn the poems in Green Hill, Lorna Knowles Blake takes the intimacies of human life and the riots of nature and transmutes them into forms that both discipline and liberate their beauty. By doing so, she also reveals the real, the secret, sovereign of that beauty-the human imagination, of which hers is a triumphant example.    - Vijay Seshadri, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of 3 SectionsWhatever subject Lorna Knowles Blake turns her hand to, she displays a prosodic surefootedness and a continual freshness of perception. Poems as different from one another as "Glosa" and "The Allure of the Ledge" will find readers to admire not only Blake's skill but the literary culture that she makes her own.    - Charles Martin, 2017 Able Muse Book Award judge, author of Future PerfectLorna Knowles Blake gives us Green Hill, poems both dark and lightheartedly inventive, the craft casual, poised-and audacious. Here, our twenty-first century Blake boldly converses with her nineteenth-century namesake, William Blake, as well as with Duke Ellington, St. John of the Cross, and others in musically dazzling poems set "free to feel/ the hook, the dock, the sun, the real/ experience." What is the real experience? It is the sense of home. The title poem begins, "So many ways to remember a house," and Blake means all abodes, from a hermit crab's shell to a "refugee's home/ the day after the raid." Relationships, too, become houses as Blake evokes moments of tenderness in a mature marriage and fears for the future-though in this deft, understatedly mythic book, the background world is still shades of green.    - Molly Peacock, author of The AnalystMoving and masterful, the poems in Lorna Knowles Blake's Green Hill don't just reveal an exquisite formal sensibility-they conduct passionate and original meditations on our fundamental need for form. In poems about artwork and landscape, myth and love, Blake considers the ways we give shape and meaning to our lives. And her poems are themselves vital enactments of that same urge. American poetry is richer for this superb collection.    - Peter Campion, author of El DoradoABOUT THE AUTHOR:Lorna Knowles Blake lives in New Orleans and Cape Cod. Her first poetry collection, Permanent Address, won the Richard Snyder Award and was published by Ashland University Press in 2008. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Barrow Street and on the advisory board of Poetry Sunday, a weekly program of WCAI, Cape Cod's public radio station. Her poems, translations, essays, and reviews appear regularly in literary journals, both in print and online.  Green Hill was the winner of 2017 Able Muse Book Award.

Eclectic characters in everyday scenarios populate Jacob M. Appel's The Cynic in Extremis. We attend a sister's second wedding with a "hand-me-down groom"; trick-or-treat with a young son; encounter a former teacher long retired, still critical; relive difficult ancestral memories of the Holocaust. These poems present-often unapologetically-uncomfortable truths gleaned from close examination of social norms and conventions mostly taken for granted. Full of fun, wit, and insight, The Cynic in Extremis is a finalist for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR THE CYNIC IN EXTREMIS:The narrative poems in Jacob M. Appel's The Cynic in Extremis cast a cold eye on present and past, personal and political. But like the cynics in their classical conception, the poet's subtext here is hope, at least love, and living without illusion in the extremis of the quotidian. These are mordantly moving, even entertaining poems, always thoughtful and frequently elegiac.-Dan O'Brien, author of War ReporterLike his stories-approachable, insightful, and touched with a tinge of sadness for what was and, indeed, is-Appel's poems speak in straightforward, plain language to raise the curtain on the intimacies of his world. New York City with its pigeon lady, the palsied pharmacist, Luigi the barber, beak-nosed Molly Seward's father, and, oh yes, the many girls who "left me breathless" and alone. You can almost hear their footsteps walking the cement pavement. Although good-humored and delightfully smart-alecky, the collection has a dark undercurrent, for it is Holocaust-haunted as he is, as we all are who escaped the horror but are doomed to remember and bear witness.-Alice Friman, author of The View from SaturnFrom this masterful collection arises the sense that, with the end so woefully unpredictable and fate so fickle-hearted, to waste any moment amounts to a sin. Quirky characters, often full of longing and regret, pepper Appel's work, like the uncle so cynical he "steered clear of con games like synagogue/ And life insurance" and his compassionate opposite, the pigeon-feeding, environment-destroying Mrs. Z. These characters seem to fail to leave a mark on the world, beyond the poet's eye.-Brigit Young (from the foreword), author of Worth a Thousand WordsBoth beautifully written and lively, the poems in The Cynic in Extremis embrace the world with warmth and wit. The portraits of family members and friends, workers and teachers, neighbors and a first love, some set in a time long gone, are wonderfully free of nostalgia and sentimentality. Human virtue, vice and folly all have a welcome place, because there's a tone of understanding, forgiveness and humor that pervades this book and makes it a joy to read.-John Skoyles, author of Suddenly It's Evening and poetry editor at PloughsharesABOUT THE AUTHOR:Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney, and bioethicist based in New York City. He is the author of seven collections of short fiction, five novels, and a collection of essays. His short stories have been published in more than two hundred journals and have been short-listed for the O. Henry Award, Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. His commentary on law, medicine, and ethics has appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Detroit Free Press, and other major newspapers. He taught for years at Brown University and currently teaches at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

In Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic, Anna M. Evans juxtaposes the recent loss of her mother with comparable elements and incidents from the 1912 disaster. Evans traces an intricate trajectory from glory to grief by means of vividly imagined details about the people and animals on board the ill-fated ship, along with evidence that the operators' blunders were avoidable. This is poetry of impressive artistry and formal mastery, with Evans in complete command of theme and craft. Under Dark Waters is a unique and spellbinding collection, and deservedly, the runner-up for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.PRAISE FOR UNDER DARK WATERS: SURVIVING THE TITANIC:Anna M. Evans is one of the best practitioners of the sonnet and the sonnet series. Her series on the Titanic is one of the most memorable I have ever read. The technical difficulty of the poem is noteworthy, but it is the construction of the book, based on that poem as a centerpiece, that is genius.    - Kim Bridgford, author of UndoneAn earlier feminist poet went "diving into the wreck" of personal experience and gender politics. Now comes Anna M. Evans, diving into the wreck of the Titanic to illuminate both personal experience and the politics of social class. Working at the height of her remarkable poetic powers, Evans fuses the historical voyage of the doomed luxury liner with the personal (her mother's fatal illness) and the political (class inequality, resonating with our own disastrous era). The result is one of the best, most unforgettable books I have read in years.    - Julie Kane, author of Paper BulletsDespite the great accomplishment of [Evans's] technical tours de force, it is not admiration for technique that is the main feeling that stays with a reader once the book is finished, rather it is the undeniably powerful emotional force of what is being said.    - Dick Davis (from the foreword), author of Love in Another LanguageABOUT THE AUTHOR:Anna M. Evans' poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle, American Arts Quarterly, and 32 Poems. She gained her MFA from Bennington College, and is the editor of the Raintown Review. Recipient of Fellowships from the MacDowell Artists' Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and winner of the 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award, she currently teaches at West Windsor Art Center and Rowan College at Burlington County.  Under Dark Waters: Surviving the Titanic was the runner-up for the 2017 Able Muse Book Award.

On the bridge over Paterson''s Great Falls, a retired state trooper is murdered by a girl in a grammar school uniform. The victim was the beloved uncle of Jack Colt, a private investigator descended from the inventor of the revolver. While investigating his uncle’s murder, Colt realizes that it is intertwined with two other cases of his. These involve the family secrets of extremely powerful New Jersey figures, including the governor, a judge, and a mob boss.  In New Jersey Noir, William Baer reinvigorates the detective genre while exploring the Garden State''s rich cultural history, glamor, and gore. Baer''s novel is fast-paced and utterly gripping, brimming with intrigue and suspense.PRAISE FOR NEW JERSEY NOIR:An accomplished poet, playwright, and short-story writer, William Baer has turned to crime, creating a brilliant debut novel, the hard-boiled whodunit New Jersey Noir. If you’re looking for classic noir elements, you’ll find them here, in spades. And you’ll find fine literary elements here, as well: precise prose, perfect pacing, stunning imagery, complex characterization, grand historical and cultural contexts, and a superb sense of place. More than anything else, New Jersey Noir is a loving tribute to the Garden State by a writer who appreciates its grime as much as its glory.  - Hollis Seamon (Jersey girl, born and raised), author of Somebody Up There Hates You Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History have I read a novel as mesmerizing, engrossing, and delectable as William Baer’s New Jersey Noir-a book so compelling that I was forced to drop everything and commit myself for several hours to experiencing, vicariously, the strange and haunted darkness that is the shadow world of this novel. In prose as fast-moving as a bullet, Baer compels the reader to keep flipping pages more and more rapidly. Baer’s writing is taut and gut-wrenching. New Jersey Noir and Baer’s talent presage a brilliant career for this wonderfully gifted writer.  - Terri Brown-Davidson, author of Marie, Marie, Hold On TightJack Colt, the private investigator in William Baer’s New Jersey Noir, romances the genre to the suspenseful effect that JJ “Jake” Gittes achieves in Roman Polanski’s acclaimed Chinatown. In place of technicolor LA, however, Baer evokes a cinematic chiaroscuro New Jersey, specifically Paterson, its history and politics limned over a baseline of Springsteen, doo-wop, and Whitney Houston. In the early pages of this compelling mystery when Colt muses that his fellow detective, Luca Salerno, “was tough all right, but not tough enough to look into the heart of darkness,” the allusion to Joseph Conrad alerts us that we are in for a more trenchant narrative than a gumshoe and dames thriller. Baer fulfills by deftly executing the universal themes of incest, adultery, madness, and undisguised evil rising out of the swamps of the Meadowlands and beyond.  - Dennis Must, author of Hush Now, Don’t ExplainABOUT THE AUTHOR:William Baer, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is the author of twenty-two books including Times Square and Other Stories, Classic American Films, Lu├¡s de Cam├╡es: Selected Sonnets, and The Unfortunates (recipient of the T. S. Eliot Award). A former Fulbright in Portugal, he’s also received the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award and a Creative Writing Fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information, visit him at williambaer.net.

Elizabyth A. Hiscox's Reassurance in Negative Space is a debut collection with the seasoned deftness of a master in its keen intelligence, wit, innovative diction, unflinching handling of loss and grief, and deep lyricism. Hiscox muses with revelatory insights on such wide-ranging topics as multifarious netsuke, nuclear fallout, artichokes "coming into new brilliance," the DMV line, the Zen of "the sublime [that] can spring from small things." By turns ecstatic and somber, profane and sacred, wise and whimsical, Hiscox proves she is a poet of the first order with this memorable collection.PRAISE FOR REASSURANCE IN NEGATIVE SPACE:In Elizabyth Hiscox's impressive debut collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, there are poems about art and loss and ecology, reindeer moss and netsuke, the precariousness of 1950s high-heeled bedroom slippers. Her poems are tightly, urgently made. Hers is a poetry held together by ingenious double meanings and wordplay, twinnings and twinings, paradox, subtle jokes and puns, fierce and delicate ironies, a rigorous intelligence and a vigor of spirit so charged and fluent that whatever she puts before us takes on resonance and import.- Nancy Eimers, author of OzElizabyth Hiscox's new collection, Reassurance in Negative Space, is haunting in the way that brilliance of mind and vision encounter an almost secret vocabulary. This is the revealing intercession of one road upon another in the outskirts of Rome a hundred years past. It is also the infrared optics of ideas of negative space peering into previously unobserved, undisturbed dark matter. A few of the poems surprise utterly, have almost a pre-creation memory for us of things that startle and seem true. She is a terrific and sometimes very funny poet of the first order.- Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of BoneThere is throughout this volume a deep and humane lyric wisdom, an almost fatalistically brilliant humor. . . . Here is a debut collection bold enough to cast an eye on Truth in poems that are both narrative (storied) and innovative, necessary poetry.- Cynthia Hogue (from the foreword), author of In June the Labyrinth"All angels pant as surely as they part"-Elizabyth Hiscox's Reassurance in Negative Space studies the relationship between negative capability and communion. Between art and comfort. No rote reassurance is sought after or offered in these pages-the chocolate bunnies (better than Lent) are delicious but hollow. And after cataloguing and deeply considering the negative spaces of art-from the tiny details of a series of Japanese netsuke sculptures, to Archeology Today articles, to pieces of literature, music, architecture, painting-Hiscox breaks a tender heart with this equivocal and necessary advice for her reader: "Fall already, beautiful." In this gorgeous and spiritually rugged ekphrastic book I do pant, I do part, and I do fall.- Sarah Vap, author of ViabilityABOUT THE AUTHOR:Elizabyth A. Hiscox is the author of Inventory from a One-Hour Room. She served as Poet-in-Residence at Durham University (UK) and is recipient of Arizona Commission on the Arts and Vermont Studio Center Grants. Selected for the Seventh Avenue Streetscape public-art initiative, her poetry was displayed on a central-Phoenix billboard for a year in conjunction with the city's First Friday art walks. Hiscox holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. She has taught writing in England, the Czech Republic, and Spain and currently instructs at Western State Colorado University where she is founding director of the Contemporary Writer Series.